


heliacal rising

by hypocorism



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: (none of the tagged chars), (offscreen) - Freeform, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Ancient Egyptian Literature & Mythology, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blind Character, Geography, Minor Character Death, Multi, Non-Graphic Violence, Nonbinary Character, Nonbinary Sirius Black, Other, Rivers, Temporary Character Death, Trans Character, Variations on Ancient Egyptian Religion, Water, feelings about abandoned churches, its the apocalypse and gender is fake, lots of heavy tags on the safe side but this is essentially a hope fic, mythology of sirius, nile river, trans girl james, water scarcity apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2019-05-02 01:56:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14534169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypocorism/pseuds/hypocorism
Summary: The rivers of the world start to dry up and become...something else.





	heliacal rising

**Author's Note:**

> This is essentially 25k of me going off about the mythology of the star Sirius, specifically wrt the Sothic Cycle and Nile mythology. I'm not an Egyptologist by any means, so this is more of a loose interpretation of those things + the Isis and Osiris myths through the lens of Sirius Black. This is kind of a mish-mash of Ancient Egyptian culture/religion/geography with a dash of Coptic/more modern stuff, and a stirring of Old Testament Angel ...stuff? Heavily inspired by a lot of things, but probably most especially, perpetually, and unfortunately, The Waste Land.
> 
> Initially started as a RS Games Team Sirius project in 2017 (yes I have perched over this almost entirely completed sucker for nine months before it felt ready), this would probably not have gotten so far if not for all the amazing people on that team, and their encouragement. Thanks especially to veeagainsttheday, mirgaxus, reachthetree, and nachodiablo for the beta help. Any remaining mistakes are my own. Love you all.
> 
> I'm probably forgetting something important so may edit these later.

The wave-break realization that it is standing nearly causes it to stumble, new legs made weak by the loud suddenness of senses. There is a strange ripple nearby, barely caught in the stretching leap from river to not-river.

An animal? A cloud blown across the moon? No. It was larger than that, more solid. In the before, trees do not move so quickly, could not be that swiftdarting thing. In the after, it cannot know, made less by the empty-dryness wrought through the change of the others. Seven.

In the now, it wonders how their change was. If they became...what?

_What am I? What are they?_ it not-quite-thinks. One.

A strange thing, a sudden feeling, like the animals look when they drown in it. Struggling, gasping, weak, empty, then cold and still.

It pushes the thought-feeling of loneliness away. Seven to one. Their changes do not matter now, only its.

In the dark that lies over the earth like a second skin, it carefully tilts its head back, stares at mother-night or what-was-mother-night.

Thinks of a long-ago now roil between Regulus and it.

_If chaos has come, mother is no longer above us, no longer protects us._

_Then who births the sun?_

It looks down, at what the stars now diffuse light over, at the body-which-is-not-a-river. It is draped in a skin, like the animals who cover themselves. A flash of memory lights at the edge of its mind. The ripple-which-was-not-a-ripple. The quickdarting thing looked like this, too. Wine-dark and smooth, like the rocks licked clean by its belly and shaded by the depth of it. The rocks that have been taken, one by one. The rocks that it misses like children.

This one, though, had not come to take. Only to look, it thinks, or look again, perhaps. Another loss. Like rocks. Like the others. It does not matter.

It prods at the skin draped over the sturdy rock-shapes that make it stand up. This skin is not like water, does not flow, does not change. It is both strangely soft and weak and oddly strong and rigid. It is warm, too. Not like the familiar touch of the sun, hot on its back. Warm all through, as if a blood-hot river throbs, barely held in by the skin.

It thinks to turn west, to death, because isn’t this death? This strange body, this dryness, this heat? Just as it turns, though, something...changes.

It has felt the sunbirth day after day, felt the rays heat the very top of it in a slow down-spreading warmth. Felt the no-longer-quite-it speed into vapor and separate up into the sky. Felt the way the sun changes, the moon changes, the earth changes, the riverbed changes, the towers rise and fall, the animals come and go, the plants sprout and die and sprout and die, while the river continues on. The river is split and broken and harvested and churned and it gives and gives and takes and takes but it never changes. It is always, essentially, the seven of them, from the slow trickle out of dryness to the sea.

Until, perched on the knife-edge of the present, this essence has cracked and vanished.

It turns slowly, a whirlpool both in and out. It feels the flashing weight of its star on the horizon. Sopdet, Sothis, Aa, flaming and diminishing, standing alone and sacred, the dog star, Sirius.

_Sirius._

The star seems to yearn toward the sun, like river-Sirius used to yearn toward the sea. It no longer exists, has dried, is dead, and yet.

Sirius is still here. Has fresh, strange, being. Is feeling the newborn sun warm this dark-ebony skin that is already starting to feel familiar, safe.

Sirius closes their eyes, tilts their head back, and looks up.

-

_At that time, the waves murmured of a mound of earth, alone among the waters. On this earth there was nothing until, one moment, there was something._

_A snake curls and uncurls in the strange dryness of the land. She writes with her body her own name. Having a name is good, but lonely. She writes with her body the name of the frog, who is now there._

_“This is not the water,” the frog remarks._

_“No,” says the snake. The frog looks pleased._

_A long time passes between these two._

-

The sky is hot and full of stars and the earth is still wet when it arrives.

A sudden dryness, and Remus’ whole body goes tense as she sees the river change.

-

On the day Sirius dries up, Lily re-evaluates. The other six rivers are long gone, and Lily has been alone since the third appeared and changed her. Changed half a dozen others, too, but Lily was different.

Whatever Lily is, it's not a bird claw for a hand, or flowers growing in narrow profusion over your ribs. It's not even the awkward twist of a spine turned half to rocks. Those changes came from merely seeing the river, being near it. Lily’s came from contact.

Her skin is a little over half transparent now, the whole front of her body from neck to knees, and swaths of clear like wildcat stripes across her back. She can mostly cover it, thankful to the desert for the easy excuse of heavy clothing. The handprint on her face, the one from where the river-come-alive touched her, that she cannot cover.

The skin bordering it is the same as ever, dark and warm and smooth. Sometimes Lily stares down at her calves, and the even orderliness of skin and hair. She never looks at her face if she can help it, but it doesn't erase the image frozen in her memory.

She thinks back, to the blurred and jerky run, the whole neatness of a hunting expedition scattered, of the fragmented group of them fleeing from the river. They made it back to camp, half-bolting half-stumbling away from that wild irresolute not-human that made no effort to pursue them. Most were herded into the medical tent. Although the changes have become more common, they still sometimes cause difficulties, and it's protocol to have every newly Changed examined.

Lily, though, they shut up alone.

It was the longest and loneliest hour of her life, naked and staring at her heart pulsing through her rib cage, at her lungs expanding and contracting almost without consent, without thought. The muscles in her thighs rippled as she paced, worked lean and strong through her role as a forager. When the doctor finally came, she brought with her the one mirror deemed worth carrying when they caravan. Lily thinks she meant it as a kindness.

It wasn't.

The thing...the river...him? Them? Her? It? No one can settle on what to call the dry ones. But now its hand is clear and solid across Lily's face. More solid than her now-invisible skin, more solid than the muscles and bones of her face underneath, more solid than her tongue, her teeth, her soul. That handprint, six-fingered and slightly webbed and questing, seeking, still clammy from the dead riverbed it sucked up the last of life from, floats over her face like an omen.

She hasn't looked since then, but she doesn't need to. It's seared before her eyes, like the star just cresting the horizon.

Sometimes Lily lays her hand over it, feels where she thinks the blurring edges of it are, the sign that she jerked away. Sometimes, looking at the way the clearness dips into layers of muscle on her chest and arms, she wonders if that’s all that stopped her from going clear entirely, from turning into vapor and disappearing into the greedy clouds with the rest of the water.

The skin doesn't feel any different. Maybe she's just touching ordinary tissue.

The river hadn't tried to follow her, hadn't even tried to touch her again. It looked confused, disoriented, like being confronted with screaming, melting humanity had been too much.

Lily thinks she knows a bit how it felt, now. The way her former comrades looked at her, like she was no longer one of them. No longer human. No longer even changed. Just clear and dry, a thing never meant to walk or breathe.

She left. The camp had been falling apart anyway, too small to defend their rations and with no seer to replenish them. Lily supposes she could try and find another camp. She's heard rumors there are some that are entirely Changed, a few whispers of one up north near the old delta that actually has an alliance with one of the dry rivers. It might even be the same river who changed her; she doesn’t listen closely enough to rumor and gossip to find out.

Being alone is easier. No one to stare, no one to question her humanity, not even herself. Can you still be human if you're alone? Does it even matter?

The long stretch of days back is mostly identical, the sounds and sights of solitude in the desert, broken briefly by necessary weeks of occasional companionship. Lily never keeps allies for long, can only stand their burning eyes and wagging tongues for as long as it takes her to get water out of them, or food, or shelter. She knows the music of her own quiet company, and relishes it.

But, well, Sirius drying up changes things. Sirius was the last barrier of normalcy, the last regular source of water, the last illusion that the camps would be enough to ensure survival. Now, what? She might be able to scavenge or steal enough material to make a solar sill, but that would tie her to one place and make her vulnerable to other thieves. For the same reason, she hasn't been able to store much water, just enough for maybe two days. She was relying on the small tributary that has now vanished, and things are looking somewhat grim.

Her best bet, she decides, is to try and find the nearest camp. Ideally, one with a seer. If they even exist. Lily, with all she has seen, trusts less and less the things she has not.

_Still_ , Lily thinks firmly, _no point in giving up before you've even tried. There’s ample time for despair, later._

Maybe the camps farther north, closer to the sea, will be more receptive to strangers. Maybe their eyes will burn less hot.

She packs up her tent with quick, efficient motions. She’s done this so many times in the past few years that it takes practically no attention. The food, the water, she’s much more slow about. Careful. Makes sure her canteens are tightly sealed, that she knows exactly how much dried jerky she has left. Foraging has gotten harder in the past few years, as the marshes have disappeared and the fish have died out.

Her hunting knife and whetstone are stowed carefully at the bottom of her pack, with her bow and the few carefully tended arrows she has left slung over her back. She isn’t optimistic that she’ll run across anything worth hunting, but there’s always a chance. The animals aren’t predictable any more, meandering heat-drunk across the desert or returning, over and over, to the bone graveyards of the riverbeds.

Lily casts a thoughtful eye over the meagre assembly of her worldly goods, pausing to think. Following the riverbed would be the easiest way to go north, but it’s also the most likely route for other travellers. The surety of direction does not seem a worthwhile trade for the solitude of the inland route. There is no more water here, and the empty riverbed has never given Lily the strange comfort many others seem to take from it. She does not trust in miracles, does not hope that water will magically spring from the place it has gone to die.

Instead, Lily glances once more over the now bare ground of her camp site, turns her back to the riverbed, and hoists her pack up over her shoulders. A compass and map will serve her well enough, and she has her knife for if they fail.

-

_At that time, the waves murmured of an ibis. His beak was curved and his legs were long and slim._

_He spreads his black-tipped wings, white against the black water, black sky._

_By the light of his wings he sees a strange dawning between the seas and the heavens. Mother sky whispers and her breath stirs his feathers._

__The sun __

_It is a light so new and bright that the ibis comes to a stop, folding his wings against his body and planting his feet._

_The sun caresses the words the snake has written, gleams across the skin of the frog. It cracks like an egg across the sky, thin and yellow._

_The ibis chirrups softly, singing for its birth._

-

James tries to ignore the cramp in her back, an unfortunate side effect of sitting hunched over a map for three hours. She isn't having any luck, but isn't keen to tell the captain that. It's not that they'll be angry, that would hardly matter. James has dealt with cruel or dictatorial leaders and has no patience for them. Her gift is strong enough that she can take her pick of camps, and she's sharp enough with her ears and handy enough with a dagger that she can fend off any kidnapping attempts. No, this captain is kind enough. A good leader. James just hates disappointing them. Not just them, really, everyone.

The whole camp relies on her for water, especially now that Sirius is gone. The last river had vanished just as its star rose above, a peculiar almost-funny coincidence. Or, perhaps not. Perhaps the astrologers were right, could have predicted the current lack of abundance from the previous millennia of overflowing, of floods. James doesn't know. Their art died out, and the seers all had to learn in a stumbling headlong rush, using what they could get at in the narrow strip of time between the appearance of their gifts and and the dissolution of order, before the power went and digital records became useless. James had better luck than some; she’s fast and efficient with her refreshable braille display and voiceover, and managed to dig up some old CD audiobooks from her astrology phase and a battery-run player after her electricity stopped working.

Physical books lasted a little longer, but most were more valuable as kindling on cold desert nights, and locating Braille books without the internet was too much work to be worth it. There are still libraries back in the cities, probably. James doesn't know. She was among the ones who chose to leave, who took only what they could carry.

Sometimes the not-knowing is comforting. She can pretend this is all one long camping trip, be grateful that she doesn't have to bother with changing her gender legally, or paying rent on her too-expensive apartment, or thankless jobs bartending and waiting on tables, people either talking loudly at her or in pitied, hushed tones. _Plus_ , James thinks cheerfully, _there’s much less to run into out here._

She just has this: her maps, the wooden figurines she carves to help remember her dreams, the snake-wrapped staff she carved herself, and the river stones in her pocket. One from Regulus, the river she was born by. One from Sirius, the last to survive.

Well, and Euphemia, although a griffon vulture isn’t the cuddliest of companions.

James hears the tent flap being unzipped, is fairly sure it’s McGonagall from their firm step even before the distinctive humming noise. In spite of her frustration with the lack of direction from whatever inattentive deity has gifted her with augury, James has to fight down a smile at the now-familiar sign of courtesy and notification.

“Any luck?”

James sighs, stretches as she rises to her feet, turning toward the sound of the captain’s voice.

“Nothing. Touching the map just feels like sand, so no new groundwater to douse for. I’m not sensing anything unusual, either. Euphemia isn’t back yet, though, and it’s possible she’s spotted something.”

McGonagall sighs, and James grimaces in apology. She opens her mouth to say something, but McGonagall cuts her off.

“Don’t apologize,” they say firmly. “You have kept this camp alive for nearly six months.”

“I suppose,” James grumbles in agreement. “Still, things will be more difficult now. With our primary source of water completely gone, we’re completely reliant on what Euphemia can spot or what I can sense.”

“I know,” McGonagall says. “But our camp has an excellent seer, and that’s more than many can say.”

“I think,” James hesitates. “I know it’s not a popular decision, but I think it might be time to move north. Even if we aren’t sure the sea is still there, we don’t know it’s-”

“I’m well aware of the costs and benefits of mobilizing,” McGonagall interrupts. They sigh again. “I’ll float the idea. It’s possible this change will make people more receptive.”

“Yes,” James says noncommittally. In her opinion, they should have left months ago, when Sirius started showing signs of change. The water sills and semi-permanent structures were hell to build, and people have developed all sorts of strange superstitions about the dry riverbed, but still. James would have gone herself, but her duties keep her busy and she doesn’t like to think of the camp left vulnerable without her to safeguard them.

“Are you going to consult with Euphemia now?” McGonagall asks.

“As soon as I hear her,” James promises.

“Good,” McGonagall says. “I’ll speak to you later, then.”

James stretches again, made restless by the renewed awareness that she isn’t doing anything, has been still for too long. She decides to walk out to the cliffs. Even if Euphemia isn’t there yet, the walk should help clear her head.

Unfortunately, James hears the slightly too-fast crunch of boots on sand that means someone is trying to catch up to her less than forty meters outside the camp. She fights down a sigh, stopping and turning to indicate she’s heard. To her increased annoyance, the person who is following doesn’t say anything when they see her stop.

“Someone there?” James prompts, rubbing her finger over the head of her staff in impatience.

“Oh! Yes. Sorry, I waved,” the person says.

“Hi, Peter,” James says. It sounds like he’s quite close now, so James turns and continues walking. “Did you need something?”

“Well, I was just wondering if you were going to find some water, or anything.”

“Hopefully soon,” James says drily.

“I didn’t mean that as a criticism,” Peter says hastily. “I was just wondering if I could watch.”

James fights down a sigh. Peter is nice enough, but he’s fixated on quantifying the developing of seer skills, finding a scientific explanation for why these new abilities have popped up so suddenly. James is half-convinced that the last seer ran off out of sheer desperation for some peace and quiet.

“I’m just going to see Euphemia,” James says, not bothering to hide her impatience.

Peter either doesn’t notice or ignores it. “Great! I can document the phenomenon of the ability to understand bird speech!”

James walks faster, trying to tune Peter out as he goes over his thesis for the zillionth time. “It’s just so fascinating how it seems like a completely random sample of people have developed these skills. And everyone is different, too. Our last seer swore by casting lots, and then we had someone for a while who would get visions and speak in this really scary voice. He wasn’t that great at navigation, though, half the time he’d come out of the vision fifty or sixty meters away from the water source, which was frustrating because-”

“Yeah, that sounds really annoying,” James says pointedly.

“I might have asked you this already,” Peter says, with the accompanying snap of elastic that mean he’s flipping open his perpetual notebook, “but I didn’t write it down. Do you generally get a sort of twinge, when the moving water sources form?”

“They’d be a lot easier to find if I did,” James grumbles. “But no. Usually Euphemia spots them, or I can feel them on the map. Sometimes I have dreams when one is forming or dissipating.”

James hears Peter scratching away with his pencil. On days when she’s less irritated with Peter, it’s sort of endearing. He has an entire pack full of notebooks and pencils and little manual pencil sharpeners. People save weird things from the time before, things that make them feel like life is still manageable, still sane. Some are more practical than others. Personally, James still keeps her refreshable braille display in her bag. The complete elimination of hydroelectric power has made charging it (or a computer or tablet to read on, for that matter) impractical, but you never know.

“And what form do these dreams take?” Peter asks. James sighs.

“Dreams aren’t really the most reliable. I don’t know what causes them a solid percentage of the time. But sometimes I’ll get a sort of...feeling in them, a bit like a magnet tug. It gets stronger if I’m going in the right direction.”

“Like a tide, maybe?” Peter asks excitedly.

“Dunno.”

“Because, you know, there are some reports that the dry rivers navigate in a similar way. I’m not sure whether it’s connected to their sort of in-between state of matter, there has been alarmingly little scientific study done, but it very well could be. You know, of course, that many people theorize that abnormally long lunar eclipse that happened a few months before signs of the first drying was a sign of-”

“Peter,” James says exasperatedly. “Could you shut up for a moment? I need to listen for Euphemia.”

“Oh, right,” Peter says. “Sorry.”

James waves a hand in acknowledgement and stops, turning her head slowly from side to side to listen. She still isn’t sure if Euphemia is back from her latest surveying expedition or not, but Euphemia generally roosts around the same place. James swings her staff around, ignoring a yelp as she accidentally clips Peter’s ankle, to orient herself. She’s walked the fairly short path from the camp to the cliff so many times she doesn’t need to focus that hard on it, just skim a bit ahead to make sure she doesn’t step on a snake (she’s not risking that again) or run into a misremembered patch of vegetation. When she gets close enough, the feel of the cliff shadow on her skin and the change in temperature of the sand tells her to slow down and go more carefully.

There are several griffon vultures up above, and James picks their calls out easily from those of other birds. James never particularly noticed griffon vultures before. She vaguely remembers hearing them, on the long walks she and her father used to take during the cool season. There is a tiny sliver of memory; the feeling of a shadow passing across her. She hears her father stop, the rustle of his kufiya as he looks up.

It’s still wedged somewhere in the back of her brain, in the increasingly precarious pile of memories of the before. There is just so much more now: more sensation, more risk, more movement, more danger. Even more to the sound of the birds.

James is broken out of her reverie by the rusty creak of Euphemia, hears the rustle and splay of her feathers, the scratch of her talons against the rock as she settles in.

Finally, she’ll get some news.

-

_Earlier_

Even after Remus realizes what it is, she can't move. She feels almost turned to stone, her heartbeat fading out into the distance as her limbs go cold and her eyes snap open, wide and trying to comprehend. Unable to.

It's not human, not really, but it looks like it's trying to be. One minute, Remus is staring down at the last riverbed, the small trickle of water still sluggishly churning its way along. Next, she's looking straight into an almost-face. The almost-eyes are slate grey, like light striking rock deep underwater. They are the most distinct by far, set in a wavery face that fades down into a mossy tree trunk bursting with a profusion of flowers.

Remus keeps looking, up, down, eyes, flowers, tree, moss, but even as she looks the shape starts to harden, to change. The flowers and moss slough off, and the tree bark darkens into skin, black and limned by moonlight. Somehow this humanness frightens Remus more than anything else, frightens her enough that she stumbles, nearly falls, barely stops herself from toppling into the bone-dry riverbed.

She's running before she can think to say anything, do anything. Before she can feel wonder, or shock, or even terror. In the space between breaths, between tree and not-tree, between river and human, she’s slipped back within the makeshift walls of the city.

Later, she's a bit disappointed in herself. The things she could have asked! The breadth of knowledge and wisdom, the history and depth of a river, all open wide in front of her. And yet, cowardly, she ran. Just as all the others had done. She didn’t even get a proper look, really, not enough to recognize it again. Then again, maybe that would be the case no matter how long she looked. Maybe the rivers, once changed, keep changing, endlessly.

In the widely spread, probably-false stories about early encounters, Remus had been skeptical about the overwhelming fear. What could be so strange, so frightening, that it could take you out of yourself?

She doesn’t know, even having faced the change herself, if what she felt was fear, or wonder, or even a sense of not-rightness. Her memory skips across the encounter, like the too-early slip of a needle on a record. It nudges back into a familiar groove, the reason Remus haunts the massive house on the hill near the upper limit of the rivers instead of the camps set up closer to the water.

The drying of the world has winnowed a sort of clarity into her previously murky life. It shattered the weakly forged connections that provided her with enough odd jobs to afford food. It stripped out the need for constant motion, killing the fear of idleness by making it impossible. Remus is alone, in a mansion left abandoned in the rush toward dwindling water, perched at the top of the ridiculous decorative tower like a nesting bird. She has more than enough food; the first rash of deaths from dehydration left behind so much emptiness and so much heavily preserved food that shelter and hunger aren’t issues any more. There is only, always, thirst.

Remus’ investigation started out of boredom, more than anything else. Why not find out as much as possible about the rivers? Nothing else to do. Nothing else to serve as a distraction from the endless dryness of her throat, her skin, the desert pressing its fingers through the narrow cracks of remaining civilization.

In all the stories she’s heard, carefully collected from the thinning population of the other city-scavengers, the change is always instantaneous. Sometimes it is so violent, so sudden, that it kills, decimates, destroys. Remus knew that was a risk, getting so close to the riverbed. Waiting, sometimes even sleeping there, was courting disaster.

_We are not built to confront divinity so directly_ , shouted from the basement-church two streets over, one of the many springing up to grapple with the sudden overabundance of death.

And now? Disaster, or something like it, has struck. The long-awaited drying of Sirius has occurred, and Remus was the only one there to witness it. She curses her own cowardice again, mumbling to herself as she strips naked. She’s long released the even cursory embarrassment at how much she talks to herself these days.

Remus stands in the master bathroom, lit by the rising sun streaming through the eastern wall of windows. She watches her body in the full-length mirror, scanning carefully for any sign of change. In most of the accounts she has heard, change happens instantaneously. As far as she can tell, it tends to be more extreme the closer the person is to the river.

There are some accounts of no change or delayed change, but Remus had mentally marked them as generally boastful and less likely valid. There are far more stories of humans meeting rivers than could possibly be true, especially since the bulk of the first wave of Changed disappeared barely days later. They either went north to the sea, or headed farther inland, or were killed or captured by rogue camp captains or city heads, depending on the rumor you believe. Remus finishes her surveillance, finishing by staring into her own eyes in the mirror.

Nothing.

Remus frowns, puzzled. Was Sirius too weak? Had it waited too long to spring up, to dry? She turns, craning her neck to look down her back. The sameness is almost unnerving, like the moment of suspended animation at the apex. It still feels like a fall is coming, like gravity is tugging at the edges of her consciousness. She thinks nervously of the stories of delayed change, of the story muttered in an unlit but still functioning bar of a Changed masquerading as human who, tired of the constant whispers of the water, set herself on fire to escape them.

Dramatic tripe and a poor understanding of mental illness, she thought at the time. It’s a lot more frightening now, looking at the slow sunlight pouring over her body.

Remus dresses again, goes to find her journal and a pen. She writes down everything she can remember, adds it to the many entries on rivers, on the Changed, to the stories she has become a vessel for. She falls asleep half-sprawled on the library couch, hand still clutching her pen.

-

_At that time, the waves murmured of the newborn gods, fresh with their own blood._

_She Who Knows All the Names watches for her star in the sky. She gathers the pieces of her husband. She braids her hair and the rain falls._

_The Lord of Silence keeps the dead. He dies. He is reborn. His boat rides the sun._

_The earth has dried, and many feet now walk across it. The river rocks and cradles, with life in its beings and flowings._

_The One Before Whom Evil Trembles swallows down the overflow that the river gives. It sits, red and unsated, in her vast lioness belly. She is well pleased._

_The Lord of Divine Words records the deeds, keeps up a careful balance of who has helped and who has harmed. His breath is the stories, they scrawl themselves across his ribs._

_She Who Eases the Way carries the lotus-truth in the curve of her arms. She gathers to her, and hastens the birth against which no second death can prevail._

-

There is too much freedom, too much choice.

Sirius is still awkward and uncertain on these legs, wavering and nearly falling.

Do they follow the riverbed? Continue that slow eternal progress toward the sea? Is the sea even still there?

Do they follow their star? The sun? Walking into all that heat and light feels overwhelming. Leaving the false safety of the dry riverbed feels overwhelming. Nothing seems safe, or sensible.

Everything is open, like the dipping roar of water rushing from river to sea. That slow diffusion, erasure, the blurring threshold of being and not-being.

The feeling worsens as Sirius clambers up the steep slope and out of the riverbed, trembling and new and full of questions.

_Am I alive? Do I exist?_

There are too many thoughts, too many feelings. Time feels sped-up and urgent, and the sun is so hot on this new skin.

Sirius turns to look back at the riverbed, half-thinking to climb back in. Memory slams into them like a wave. The rushing ache of loss after loss, building on each other until the coldness of the pain numbs them.

Seven, always seven, then six, sudden and fast, splitting five slow years off from millennia of riverrush.

Six, and all of them trying to change at once, to cling to the vapor breathed in by birds, to see through their eyes, to seek, to seek, to seek.

Six, then five. More expected but just as painful, the strangeness compounded by the way the three of them were bundled into one course, two of them into another.

Five. Four, four, four, and every one a lack. Four that felt like the slow spill of chemicals, the feeling of dead things, the desert so dry the water disappears on contact. Four was when it gave up.

Three, two, barely noticed, one. More animals, more death, more panic, more taking and taking and taking and no rain to replenish it.

It half-expected a slow, dry death. Half-thought this was death.

_Then who births the sun?_

Sirius shakes this head, pushing the long dark hair back and out of this face. They’re gone, all of them, even Regulus. Even Sirius. Nothing to do about it now.

In the end, Sirius places their feet carefully in the turn-smudged footprints left behind by the quickdarter. The prints are hard and solid, mud turned to ridged clay in an instant. Sirius aligns. Sirius walks.

-

_In this story, the wing heralds its arrival. First it is a lump, hot and pulsing. The sharp pain of a shoulder blade needing to be sliced, lanced, gently lacerated open. The splintercrack of bones breaking under skin like the rumbling crash of waterfall. That bone-deep ache of growth and change like hibernation, like chrysalis. Nothing visible, not yet, just a shredding gnaw like a blunt toothed monster is nursing on her shoulder bone._

_Told in the lobby of an old hospital, by a nurse who had seen too many deaths to believe in anything, anymore, except the stories moaned out by the sandpits on dark nights._

It’s the pain that wakes Remus, in a shocking sudden emersion from a dream where she’s being ripped apart. After the vision of a vulture ripping the muscle of her shoulder loose from her bones, the soft fabric of the sofa on her back feels almost as shocking as the pain itself.

Stumbling to her feet, Remus staggers out of the library, her sole focus on getting back to the mirror. The pain is so strong it makes her waver, uncertain, on her feet. She clutches at the wallpaper of the hallway, nails scrabbling and unable to find purchase.

Images flash across her vision, illustrations of distorted features and figures twisted in pain. The six bodies she found when she chose this house, the smell of death, the smell of earth, the blood-cracked calluses on her palms from digging in the dry dry dirt. Grey eyes, too distant to be human, too knowing to be animal, too frightened to be divine.

The door slams back against the wall Remus pushes it so hard, bouncing back and catching her arm. She hardly notices, too focused on getting to the mirror.

She scans her body, doesn’t see anything wrong, but a fresh wave of pain doubles her over on the marble countertop and nausea swirls through her spinning head.

_There’s blood on my hands,_ Remus thinks distantly. Everything goes black.

-

Being pent in by these juggernauts of steel and concrete feels unnatural, transposed, with depth flowing upward instead of down. Sirius feels, impossibly, like a river stone. One of those long gone. Did they cross over this same path?

In the heat of the morning, everything gleams with a false light. It mimics the radiance of water but it is not water. When touched, it is hot and smooth and still.

Sirius looks away from the not-water.

The buildings all seem to be empty, but a river can always find the sea, and Sirius knows the sea they are looking for.

The door, for all its solid wooden bulk, provides no resistance. It opens, easy and silent, turned and pushed ajar by the barest motion of their fingers. Even these still-strange, weak fingers. These hands which do not wear and grind and shape. They are too fast, too imprecise. They dart and flutter uselessly, nothing like the slick whirl of cool water: eternally waiting, eternally patient.

There is a weakness in this house. A breach. A place the river spills over into another tributary. Sirius can feel the wrongness of the place all over their skin, almost doesn’t want to go in.

They think of the dry riverbed, of the tall, dead buildings, of Regulus.

One foot is slipped slowly over the threshold, treading lightly over the splintered wood of the half-destroyed door. The floor beyond is smooth and slick, another surface of not-water. Sirius moves faster, picking up their feet quickly and setting them down toes-first and slow. They breath a sigh of relief when the floor roughens, their sense of wrongness dissipating slightly, although not completely.

_Another obstacle_. The world is quiet here, but Sirius can feel the thrum of the river-blood upstairs like they used to feel the other six running alongside them.

If it weren’t for that feeling, Sirius would not be sure, now that they see this human, whether it was the right human. She is half-curled half-collapsed on the floor, a jagged still-forming bloody mess of a wing sprawling skewering out over the right side of her body.

She doesn’t look up, doesn’t move, doesn’t acknowledge Sirius.

“How were you broken?” Sirius asks, fighting the peculiar urge to touch the place that aches. They thirst for all these feelings strange, these new experiences. They feel so dry that knowledge is the barest drop of water, evaporated instantaneously.

“You,” comes the reply. Something wrenches inside Sirius, the sense of wrongness coming back in full flow. The river holds many things: the hissing sibilance of whispered secrets, the choking clutch of plants grown from rotting bodies, the coldness of death, the gasp of birth and re-birth, but it does not hold this. This change is new, like this body is new. The parallel of it comforts Sirius, at least.

They do reach out to touch now, run their hands over the soft throb of bone and blood; that river that runs through the human still beating sluggishly through the changed side, the altered wing.

They aren’t sure what they expect to happen, but nothing much does. The blood sluices over Sirius’ hands, bright and fresh, dark and chalky. A feather catches in the sea spray of red, clinging and tickling slightly.

“I’d wash the blood off but there’s no water.”

The human is almost laughing, the pull-push of humor and despair like a tide under the words.

Sirius tries to take away their hands, unsure if this touch has been rude or good. The interflow without interflow, the touching without dissolving. It feels familiar to Sirius, but this human has not felt what it is to come to delta.

“Don't. Your hands are cold,” she says.

“Cold is good?”

“Yes.”

The quiet rustle of feathers, the rush-click of bone and blood whisper around the edges of the bathroom.

“How did you find me?” the human asks.

Sirius tilts their head.

“There isn’t a sea, now. I flow the way I am placed to flow. Your footprints placed me here.”

At this, the human pushes up. Sirius looks at her curiously, wondering how much alike they look, how much different.

“What?”

Sirius huffs out an impatient sigh at the human’s lack of understanding.

“My riverbed does not tell me where to go any longer.”

The human’s eyes widen.

“And I’m supposed to tell you where to go? I haven’t even been able to figure out anything about the Changed, let alone-” the human breaks off.

“What are the Changed?”

The human looks at them, sighs.

“Look, have you eaten?” Sirius blinks. The human sighs again. Sirius mimics the sound, liking that they can create their own breeze, their own movement, now. “I’ll take that as a no. You need clothes, too. And, well, I’ve just been calling you Sirius, that’s what we call the river, but is that okay?”

Sirius nods.

“Yes. My star is in the sky right now. Have you got a star?” they ask politely. One never knows.

_Regulus had a star_.

Sirius touches the lone wing again to push the thought away.

“I’m Remus,” the human says, pushing slowly to her feet and wincing in pain. Sirius hops up, too, eager to see what these new things are.

Eating is fine, it makes the wrongness go away a little, but clothes are better.

“You pick these?” Sirius asks wonderingly. They always thought the humans had no choice in their coverings, just as the animals have no choice in their skins.

“Well it’s not exactly my taste,” Remus mutters. Sirius ignores her, trying on a button up shirt and shorts with bright splashes of patterns across them.

Remus insists that they wear something long, and light colored.

“If you’re going outside, anyway,” she says. “I don’t know if you can get dehydrated, but would rather not risk it.”

“I think I’m already dehydrated,” Sirius points out. Remus smiles a little, then walks slowly over to the closet to change out of her bloody shirt. For a while, Sirius focuses on helping her cut a hole and maneuver the wing through it. Remus doesn’t make any noise, but the hardness in the muscles on her arms and shoulders tells Sirius it hurts.

“I didn’t mean to make you hurt,” Sirius says, once the shirt is finally on and Remus is leaned against the wall, forehead pressed to the spiralling design of the paper. Remus turns her head to look at them.

“I know,” she says. “You asked what the Changed are earlier. They’re like me. Or,” she pauses, frowning. “I’m one of them now, anyway. It’s just the word people use for humans who have met rivers. It changes us. I don’t know if it’s always, or if it’s only those nearby when a drying happens.”

Sirius feels that same quick-drowning feeling sweep over them.

“Have you seen other dryings?” they ask. Remus shakes her head. “But you know about them?” Sirius presses.

“A bit,” Remus pushes off the wall, walking over to the crisp white divan under the window and perching on the edge of it. “What do you want to know?”

Sirius tilts their head contemplatively, pushing back the waters. “Do you think Regulus is like me?”

Remus blinks, surprised and confused or thrown for a second, but maybe not because she has heard this before. Heard it all before, a story that is repeated over and over and never changing but always changing.

“Yes,” she says slowly, “yes I do.”

-

_At that time, the waves murmured of a golden jackal who watched over the dead. His black coat is rich like the river-silt and the mantle of it settles over the bodies like a shroud. His eyes are fixed on the golden scales and he breathes in the sweetness._

_When the left eye of the moon was closed, The Lord of Silence undertook his daily journey. He did not wish to shirk this duty, but knew the rare danger of it. The Lord of Divine Words, the master of equilibrium, has closed his eyes with the moon and is unable to keep watch._

_The Lord of Silence steers his boat across the sky, listening to the throb and hum of night, the watery sounds of the stars. His eyes are forward. He does not see The Serpent Who Encircles the World curling through the sky to his left. The boat runs aground on the flinty head of the serpent and capsizes._

_The Lord of Silence falls. The sun does not see. The moon does not see. Only the jackal, who watches the space between Life and Death, sees._

-

“You can’t just go charging off with no idea where you’re going,” Remus says.

“Why not?” Sirius asks. Remus sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose.

“It’s not safe. Do you know how many people would kill to have one of the rivers under their control?”

“No,” Sirius says. “How many?”

Remus blinks at them.

“Just...a lot.” She rallies, shifting her wing and wincing slightly at the fresh wave of pain. She can’t decide if sitting on the divan is any better than standing. “In any case, you don’t have water, or supplies. You have no idea where you’re going.”

“I am going to find Regulus,” Sirius says, jaw tightening and chin tilting up, as if they’re bracing for a fight. Remus sighs. Why does she even care? Sirius is nothing to her, after all. What’s the point of looking for answers when even the rivers don’t have them?

“Fine, go,” Remus says, turning away. She glances at her reflection in the sliver of mirror she can see through the open bathroom door. She looks down, grimaces at the smears of dried blood on her arm.

“You come, too,” Sirius says. They don’t ask, they don’t even command. They just speak as if their word is basic fact.

“No. I’m staying here.”

Sirius frowns, as if Remus is not understanding them correctly.

“You come.”

“I’m staying here,” Remus repeats, louder. It’s not her most brilliant comeback, but she’s achy and tired and has been in too much pain to go get water from the safe downstairs for a day and a half now. The bit of food she managed to eat earlier helped, but it was just from the snacks she keeps in the bedroom, nothing substantial. She pushes to her feet again, with the vague idea of just walking away from the conversation. She’s fed and clothed Sirius. As far as she’s concerned her obligation has been met.

“No.” Sirius’ eyes look thunderous, somehow, like rain is gathering inside them.

“Yes.” Remus folds her arms and tilts a bit, wing flaring out to the side automatically to steady her. The sharp fire of it burns through her, clarifying her anger. Suddenly, though, there’s nothing to push back against. Sirius is distracted, watching the wing curiously. Remus feels something gather at her shoulder blade, cool and wet. She tries to turn toward it, hand flying up. Her first thought is that she’s bleeding, again or still, but the skin at the wing base feels smooth and whole, finally. She pulls her hand away, looks down at it in confusion. She still half-expects to see a bright bloom of red across her fingers, but the liquid is clear, and cool, and too thin to be blood.

Remus looks over at Sirius, fighting down a shiver. Sirius still isn’t looking at her, eyes fixed on the air just above her wing. Over Sirius’ shoulder, reflected in the handspan of visible mirror, Remus watches the same patch of air. In it, gathering, swirling, and then falling, is water. It drips slowly, soaking first into the warm red-brown feathers of the marginal covert, trailing beaded now-rusty red water onto the alula. The startling white of the primary covert, now clean, looks shockingly delicate without a coating of blood. The bars of her wing, obvious in the primary feathers and shading into subtlety in the secondaries, appear next.

And suddenly, the last of the water is dripping into a puddle on the bathroom floor and her strange, inexplicable wing is dry and clean. Remus almost forgets the pain in her shoulder, the heavy drag of her body fighting to destroy this invasion, this mutation, in awe. The wing flutters slightly, feeling more like the movement of her lungs than that of her arm. It starts to close, tucking close to her body and sparking firebright prickles along her shoulder and back. Remus watches it until it’s tucked tight against her body, and then, only then, does she look at Sirius.

Eyes gleaming triumphantly, Sirius grins.

“It’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Water to wash the blood off. Guess I’m not completely dehydrated after all.”

Remus opens her mouth. Closes it again. She doesn’t know what to say. Something about this feels larger and stranger than the drying of the world, the slow-boiling panic as people denied and clawed at the ultimately undeniable lack of rain. She feels more present in her body, penned in by Sirius’ crooked grin and aura of power, than she has in a long time. Since she stopped the endless grind of work, since she pulled back from what few friends she had, since she hid in this house, a useless bulwark against eternal drought. Even since she started trying to find a solution, risking her life so casually it felt shocking when it was finally, actually, threatened.

It hits Remus, suddenly, the weight of this new reality. She has faced this thing that everyone craves, that everyone fears even more. She’s still alive, heart pumping, lungs filling, wing fluttering.

Still, finally, alive.

She weighs her options. Is staying here, not-quite-safe and half-entombed, really better? Is going back to that life chasing the tiny scraps and sparks of something wondrous even something she can do, now? When you’ve touched a star, how do you settle back to tracing the streaks it makes across the sky?

“Okay,” Remus says. “Let’s go find Regulus.”

-

There is a power gathering somewhere, itching at the edges of James’ consciousness, and she’s going a bit mad trying to pin it down.

She paces her tent, hand rubbing at the stone in her pocket over and over again. Waiting to feel something, anything, shake loose. She can sense Euphemia’s growing unrest in the corner in the way she ruffles her feathers and the little scratching sounds her claws make as she shifts on her post. James sighs, stopping in the middle of the tent, toes digging into the sand. She’s tempted to go outside, go look for whatever-this-is that won’t let her be.

Euphemia, who doesn’t like the tent at the best of times, is particularly restless tonight. She doesn’t like how small it feels, barely two times the width of her wings. She especially doesn’t like the way she needs to walk into the tent after James, or that the tent flap closes behind her. She tolerates it, though, on the nights James needs her council. James is a reliable source of food and water (Euphemia has fresh water even when James herself does not), and James likes to think they’ve developed some fondness for each other.

James wanders over to the post, stopping to rummage some food out of the pouch around her waist.

“What do you think?” she murmurs. Euphemia takes the piece of meat from her hand and swallows it before responding.

Euphemia doesn’t talk to James, precisely. James can get a vague sense of meaning from most bird calls that she hears, but Euphemia’s rusty sawing croaks are the clearest of all. It’s more a feeling, than anything else. A sudden sense that she knows precisely what Euphemia wants, or needs, or has seen.

In this case, it’s something like _nothing here, many things out there_. It’s a solid point. James sighs, going over to grab her staff and her cloak. It’s long enough past sunset that it will be cold outside.

-

The emptiness here is so profound that it aches. Strangely, that is why Regulus comes here, the pain of it.

The doors are battered and dented in places, but so old and so thick that they still form a steady bulwark against the outside. It takes nearly ten minutes to get them open, takes the slow-flowing strength of his muscles building into a crashing rush that can coax any object out of his path, wear down any resistance. The doors creak threateningly, but they have never failed to close again, to shut him in safely behind them.

Regulus leans back against the solid mahogany, closing his eyes and taking strength from the life that still thrums through the whorls and knots of the wood. Nearly two years, and he’s still adjusting to the strange weakness of this body. The way that its energy ebbs and flows is a current he can’t ever quite master. He opens his eyes again, slipping his bloody shoes off to feel the cool dusty marble under his bare feet.

The quiet is absolute. Regulus has long perfected the art of walking silently, and he’s come here so many times he dips and turns around the objects in his path by muscle memory alone.

He tilts his head back, never able to resist the slicing promise of empty divinity. The perfect, aching raggedness of the hole in the roof, the half-furled wing flung out to the left of it, the golds and blues and green so bright they burn and dance in front of his eyes. The figures forming some story that he can’t interpret but loves so fiercely it feels like dropping again into that half-alive space between river and human.

Walking like this, head thrown back, makes him dizzy, but that’s part of it too. Sometimes he thinks he only feels properly alive when he feels this body spasming and jerking with the effort of containing him, in that wild gap between desire and existence.

The exhaustion hits him suddenly, sweeping aside jubilation with a leaden quickness. He stumbles slightly, catches himself against the carved smooth edge of a wooden bench. This journey upwards, the coming again to the only place that feels like home anymore, has tired him.

Regulus slips down, curls up on the bench, head still turned irresistibly upward so the ceiling spins above him. The still-fresh bruises on his side ache, but his feet have finally, blessedly, gone numb. The burns there will scar, probably, but Regulus can’t be bothered about that now.

Crying is a waste of water, but water is a gift he doesn’t want any more, and he squanders it with as much animus as he can muster. He misses the riverbed that hasn’t been safe to return to in over a year with a sudden, throbbing fierceness.

Through the aperture above, the sun streaks a red-orange threnody across the sky, and Regulus shivers.

It is not quite right in him, he thinks, the nauseating thrill he feels when watching the sun die. That utter confidence that it will come back unchanged, reborn, a force larger than him, capable of swallowing him entirely. A river does not fear much, and Regulus no longer has the strength to fear even fire, even dryness. They are weapons wielded by humans, who fear so much that he envies them.

The door creaks in warning and Regulus bolts upright. He feels so stupid, suddenly, for blocking off all the other exits when he first found this place. He thought it would be safer, would keep out the dying animals that sometimes wander in here to seek shade. He never thought anyone would find him here.

It’s not that they wouldn’t want to, of course they would. The last camp he fled, or the one before that, or the one before that. It’s more that he had trusted to his own untraceability, his own dilution into the molecules and atoms that make up this infinitesimal body. He has panted after fear so long that it’s come slinking to his door.

As Regulus slides off the long wooden bench and crawls into the dusty space beneath, his mind skims backward, seeking where he went wrong.

Was it his carelessness in returning to the slowly dying sea, unable to resist a last glimpse of it to sustain him through the shelter-taking? His even more foolish visit to Sirius’ dry bed, the fruitless search for even a gram of water indicating Sirius’ survival? Was it even before then, counting on the sand to fill in his footprints and trusting the camels not to betray him? His blood left behind in the camp square, trickling weakly before being slurped up by the insatiable desert?

_It doesn’t matter, in the end,_ Regulus thinks, squeezing his eyes closed to avoid seeing what’s coming for a little longer. This is a new luxury that this limited body affords, and he relishes it.

The heavy tread of boots paces up the centre aisle, just one pair, it sounds like. Regulus feels a brief flare of hope. He’s fast, and it’s likely he can outrun one person, even with the still-weeping blisters on his feet. Perhaps he can even pass as human, show he has no water and no food and therefore nothing to steal.

He rolls clear of the wood, rising in a half-crouch and trying to get a look at whatever’s just come in before it can spot him. By staying low until it passes, he manages to get a glimpse.

It looks human. Certainly isn’t a river, in any case. But...Regulus feels his eyes widen, body still frustratingly showing his emotions before he can control them. He recognizes this human. This place is no longer safe; it has become one more home destroyed.

Panic surges its way up his throat and waterfalls down into his limbs. He moves as silently as possible back, rushing toward the door. He’s nearly there when his foot catches on a rough hard thing. He has just enough time to guess that the human must have moved it before he crashes to the ground.

In a whirl of red and orange and grey, it turns, pinning him with its eyes.

_Fire_ , Regulus thinks, _and blood_.

-

_At that time, the waves murmured of She Who Knows All the Names and her search for her husband._

_She calls the secret name of the Sun, and he comes to her._

_“Where is the Lord of Silence?” she asks._

_The Sun looks over the surface of the Earth and the waters, but he cannot look into the secret place where the Lord of Silence is hidden._

_“I do not know, Lady,” says the Sun._

_She Who Knows All the Names goes to the Lord of Divine Words. He is the son of Mother Night and the brother of the Lord of Silence. He knows the secrets of the moon._

_“Where is your brother?” she asks. The Lord of Divine Words frowns._

_“My eyes were closed by the umbra of the earth,” he says. “Even with them open, I cannot see my brother.”_

_She Who Eases the Way comes to She Who Knows All the Names. With her comes a golden jackal._

_“I have seen the Lord of Silence,” says the jackal._

-

“You,” Lily whispers. She’s startled, face to face with this being she never expected to see again. If she had considered this meeting even remotely, she might have anticipated feeling fear of further change, or the opportunity to vent some anger, but strangely she feels neither. The river looks more frightened of her than she does of it, and with a stomach turning flash of memory she recalls the story of capture six companions ago bragged about, the smell of salt-blood, the too-thin redness of it.

Lily snaps herself forcibly back into the present, striding down the aisle and approaching. The river doesn’t try to flee, watching her with wide brown eyes from under a fringe of tight black curls. Lily crouches in the aisle putting her face level with it.

“Regulus,” she says. The river is still watching her, wariness flashing briefly across its face before it’s wiped smooth. It's eyes dart over the edges of the handprint smudged across her cheek and Lily sees its fingers tighten on the broken piece of wood Lily kicked aside as she walked down the aisle. She reaches automatically for her knife, body responding to the perceived threat faster than thought.

The river doesn’t swing the wood at her, though, or run, or even cower. It just watches, eyes so wide she feels like she’s drowning in them. Looking away from a potential threat goes against every instinct Lily possesses, but she forces her eyes down, slips her knife back into its holster.

_He's just a boy,_ she thinks, with an echo of sympathy she thought she was no longer capable of gathering up. _Just a soft boy who didn't guard his flank well enough, who keeps running back with open arms to hold those who slash and bite at him._

In spite of all appearances, though, the wounded can cut you quicker than the whole, and trust does not sit easily on Lily’s spine. She backs up, head tilted so she can watch Regulus out of one eye and her path back out of the other. It’s late, past sunset, but she can find other, safer, shelter.

“What are you called?” It asks softly, the words a strange blend of several different accents. Lily gets briefly distracted trying to place all of them, unpick the threads of intonation and sound, then shakes her head to clear it. She stops moving, moving her focus fully back onto the river.

“Lily,” she says. “I don’t know if you remember, but-” she trails off. From the way its eyes have drifted to her cheek again, it does remember. Lily doesn’t know if that makes her a threat, or a gift, but she isn’t keen on being either. She starts to back up again, and Regulus pushes to his feet.

“Do you have water?” he asks, and Lily tenses all over. It feels like a trap, suddenly, the wounded eyes, the blood-smeared marble, the groan of heavy wooden doors. She thinks of running, thinks of the half-inch of liquid spreading itself between her and death, the empty containers on her back that Regulus could fill with a thought.

“What do you want for it?” she says, widening her stance, sparing only enough attention to skim the walls, make sure this isn’t an ambush. Regulus starts toward her, wavering and limping and Lily’s back goes tight. She hates her own softness, the core in her that still hurts for him. She hates the automatic calculation, the knowledge that he is smaller than her, head barely up to her shoulder, and thinner, and weaker. She hates her fear, the dryness in her mouth and the spin at the edges of her vision that she hasn’t slaked since she left that first camp. She wants to run, but the chance of a trap is a feather in the brass scale tipping toward the certainty of her own dryness.

He reaches out, and she puts one of the containers in his hands, watches the water gather and storm against the sides.

-

“I still don’t understand why we’re going up,” Sirius complains. Remus takes a breath through gritted teeth.

“We’re going north, not up.”

“But you said it means up.”

“On a map, yes.”

“How can it be up, though? It’s downstream.”

“Well, the map makers didn’t consult you, did they?”

“But it’s just wrong,” Sirius says, throwing up their hands. They look quite pleased with the effect of this gesture and repeat it immediately.

“In any case,” Remus says, “we’re going the same way.”

“Names matter, though,” Sirius grumbles. Remus tentatively reaches out a hand, and Sirius smiles and grabs it. They seem strangely pleased by the idea of contact. Remus, who isn’t used to casually touching anyone, is a bit baffled by their eagerness and easy trust.

She bites her lip, rolling her shoulder a bit to loosen it.

“Wing hurting?” Sirius asks. Remus sighs.

“Yes. Seems pointless to complain about it, though. That doesn’t stop it.”

Sirius shrugs, indifferent.

“So, why are there so many dots on the map near me?”

“Because you’re so important,” Remus says, mock-seriously. Sirius wrinkles their brow, peering over at Remus.

“Are you doing that sarcasm thing again?” they ask suspiciously. Remus laughs, squeezing Sirius’ hand.

“Just a bit. It’s sort of true, though. A lot of people live where there’s a lot of water, and cities are where the people live. Or, lived. Now, it doesn’t matter so much. Everywhere’s equally dry.”

Sirius is quiet at this, which startles Remus a bit. They’ve barely stopped talking since they convinced Remus to come along with them. She doesn’t want to intrude, though, and some time to think won’t hurt, so she maintains the silence.

They’re walking along the side of the dried riverbed, more for ease of navigation than for anything else. Remus isn’t entirely sure where Regulus is, but from what she’s heard, at least two of the rivers live up where the delta used to be. It seems as good a place to start as any. Although it’s a long walk, several days journey, the navigation is easy enough.

_And I don’t need to worry about finding water,_ Remus thinks, glancing over at Sirius a bit nervously. The fact that Sirius can generate water at will is wonderfully convenient, but it presents additional difficulties. Remus has kept an eye out for other travellers, and been able to easily avoid camps with their cookfires and dustclouds, but there’s always the chance of someone coming upon them unawares. Sirius is stubborn, and vastly overconfident in their ability to protect themself. Remus worries about what might happen if someone really dangerous spotted them.

“Is the sea gone, then?” Sirius asks. Their voice is quiet, but Remus startles as she’s pulled suddenly back into the conversation.

“What?”

“The sea,” Sirius repeats. “Has it gone, too?”

Remus blinks.

“Er, not that I know of?” Sirius sags in relief next to her, and Remus frowns at them slightly.

“Why do you ask?”

“Well,” Sirius says, bright and cheerful again, “why don’t the humans just go live there?”

“It’s a bit complicated,” Remus says, sighing. “For one, up until, well, you dried up, there was still water down here.”

“Up here,” Sirius corrects. Remus rolls her eyes, but grins a little.

“Up here, if you like. Anyway,” she continues, “between that and the seers, it was still possible to survive, although difficult. I don’t know much about the camps, but I know a lot of people didn’t want to abandon the cities. There’s a fair amount of technology still working, and shelter, and food storage. Plus,” Remus hesitates, glancing over at Sirius, who is watching her with open curiosity. “I think it’s also,” she says slowly, “well, it’s a bit hard to leave behind everything you’ve known. Especially when people who are close to you have died.” She expects more innocent curiosity at this, doesn’t think Sirius has any sort of scope of experience to understand loss, or death, or home. To her surprise, Sirius nods in understanding.

“I probably wouldn’t leave,” they say thoughtfully, “if I didn’t think Regulus was somewhere out there.”

“Oh.”

Sirius shrugs.

“Well, without any of the others, without Reg, without,” Sirius pauses, looking down at their body in a concentrated fashion.

“Without being...” Remus fumbles for the words, “what you really are?”

Sirius looks thoughtful, humming a bit under their breath.

“Yes and no,” they say. “Without being that me. The me that is the river, that is moving and flowing and changing and enveloping and overflowing and changing from water to air and back again. Without that,” Sirius pauses again. “But-” they make a frustrated noise, tugging at the pretentiously upmarket jumpsuit they dug out of the back of one of the closets upstairs, “I’m still me.”

Remus feels a bit stupid, suddenly. For all Sirius doesn’t know, they’re much older and wiser, have lived so many more lives, than Remus. She feels strangely small, all of a sudden, like a grain of sand swirled about helplessly by the wind.

“It’s just a place, isn’t it? It’s not home anymore.”

“Where is home, then?” Remus asks, more because she’s curious what Sirius will say than because she expects a proper answer.

“I’m not sure yet,” Sirius says slowly. They smile again, sudden, unexpected, and brilliant. “But I think we’re going to find it soon.”

-

_At that time, the waves murmured of She Who Knows All the Names walking with the jackal._

_He has left his sister, the Feather of Balance, to watch over the dead. The living may descend into chaos, the sun may fall from the sky, the clouds may stop up their mouths, but still the scales of the dead will balance._

_In all the twelve regions of the land of the dead, She Who Knows All the Names does not find her husband. His river does not push its banks, his star is dark in the sky, the blessed dead who live again are in shadow._

_The jackal knows the land of the dead, it is his own pavilion and domain. He knows its secrets._

_There are many doors to the land of the dead, but few can trap a soul between one world and the next. Fewer still are strong enough to contain a god. There is only one, the jackal knows. He has traced the falling of the Lord of Silence and it is to this door he leads She Who Knows All The Names._

-

Euphemia is working herself up to being properly irritated, and James flaps a hand at her.

“Well, go hunt if you want.”

_I don’t leave._

“The hopping about and cawing is quite annoying, you know.”

_The staying still is more annoying._

James quirks a bit of a grin at that. She sighs, fidgeting with the edges of her blanket and tapping her fingers against her knees. Euphemia has a point, the waiting is pretty boring. James doesn’t know what else to do, though. The sense of urgency that led her out here, that placed her by this empty riverbed, has evaporated. She knows she’s waiting for something, but doesn’t know what it is or when it will come.

The camp probably thinks she’s abandoned them, but she feels pinned here by anticipation. Whatever’s coming is more important than a few days of water, than a few days of hope, even. It’s gathering in the air like rain. James pulls out her pocket knife and a small knot of wood, starts whittling at it. Euphemia croaks in irritation at this sign of complacency.

_I look again soon._

“Don’t go far,” James says. She feels vulnerable and exposed, out here on an unfamiliar stretch of riverbank. She trusts in her seer abilities, but she prefers when she can also trust her muscle memory, her ears, the feel of canvas and rope and rock and the smooth wood of her staff that root and guide her. This wandering out on the branched tributary of a limb is a leap of faith she isn’t quite confident in.

James hears the beat of wings as Euphemia takes flight, the callback of,

_Don’t die. I return_ , that’s half-amusing and half-comforting.

James knows that something has shifted even before she hears Euphemia less than a minute later, still close but not turning back yet.

_Two, following the river. One has been favored_. It’s hard to gauge distance from the way sound travels out here, but neither Euphemia nor the people can be far. James gets up, shaking out her blanket and bundling it back into her pack. She picks up her staff, checks her knife to make sure it slides from its holster smoothly.

Excitement bubbles in her stomach as she starts making her way up the riverbed, toward the sound of Euphemia’s call.

-

“This is a terrible idea,” Remus says, for the tenth time.

“Can you still not hear it?” Sirius asks, bouncing on their toes in between every step so as not to pull Remus forward.

“I just hear the wind.” Remus tilts her head back, and Sirius gives an impatient grunt as their joined hands force them to stop as well. “Well, and that griffon vulture.”

“Not that. It’s a sort of humming. Like water.”

Remus sighs.

“There isn’t any water.”

“Just, come on,” Sirius whines. They don’t want to pull Remus, make the joint of the winged shoulder hurt, but they do want to go forward.

“I’m-” Remus starts, but her voice dies in her throat as she sees someone in the distance. It’s just one figure, and there are two of them, but Remus does not trust this sound that Sirius is following.

The two and the one move closer together, circled overhead by a griffon vulture who calls out every twenty meters or so. The space between them decreases and decreases, Sirius winds tighter and tighter at her side, and Remus worries.

“Finally,” the figure calls. “I’ve been waiting for ages. Euphemia was getting impatient.”

“See,” Sirius seems to be attempting a whisper but doesn’t manage to either lower their voice much or get very close to Remus’ ear, “I told you I heard something.”

“What do you want?” Remus asks, stopping with a good seven meters between them and the stranger. Sirius drops her hand and goes forward, getting closer to the stranger than is strictly polite.

“Er, hello,” the stranger says, attempting to reach a hand out for a handshake and knocking into Sirius’ side instead. She looks a bit startled by Sirius’ proximity. Sirius, not dissuaded by surprise or quick on picking up human social convention, appears to be sniffing the stranger.

“Sirius,” Remus says exasperatedly, and then stops abruptly. It occurs to her, too late, that this name might be too revealing. Indeed, the stranger looks measurably more alert and interested than she was upon first hailing them.

“You’re not Regulus,” Sirius sounds so disappointed that Remus is briefly distracted from her own watchfulness.

“I’m James,” the stranger says.

“How did you make the water noise?” Sirius demands. “You aren’t one of us.” James’ brow furrows in confusion.

“What water noise?” The circling vulture calls again, and James’ brow clears slightly. “Look, let’s sit down for a moment. Euphemia says you look like you’ve been travelling a while. You can share some of my water.”

The gesture is largely meaningless considering Sirius’ abilities, but James either does not know this or is generous enough to offer any way.

“Is your camp nearby?” Remus asks, making her way over to the other two and pulling Sirius back slightly. “I’m guessing Euphemia is one of your scouts.”

“Sort of,” James says, grinning for some reason. “Here, let me lay my blanket out. Bit less sandy, that way.”

Once they’re all settled, James seemingly content with her canteen, Sirius crawling nerve-rendingly close to the edge of the riverbed, and Remus trying to watch both the others, silence falls for a few hesitant minutes.

“Right,” James says, holding out the canteen. Remus takes it, but does not drink from it. “So you’re Sirius. As in the river.”

Remus shakes her head at Sirius, trying to indicate that they should keep silent.

“Yes,” says Sirius. Remus sighs.

“Right,” James says. She taps a finger on her chin thoughtfully. “Well. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this.”

“What do you mean?” Remus asks, grabbing the back of Sirius’ jumpsuit and tugging them back onto the blanket. Sirius gives her a look but subsides.

“Well,” James straightens up. “I’m a seer for a camp a few hours southwest. I had a sort of,” she waves her hand vaguely, “sense that I was supposed to be out here for some reason.”

“That seems awfully convenient.”

James raises her eyebrows.

“Well, ‘convenient’ would be an idea as to why. I don’t get the sense you two are looking for a camp to join?”

“We’re going downstream to look for Regulus,” Sirius says. “I thought you were him. How did you make the water noise?”

Remus pushes the canteen into Sirius’ hands, hopes (probably fruitlessly) that filling it will distract them from revealing yet more information.

“I didn’t make any noise, not intentionally, anyway,” James says thoughtfully. “I don’t know much about the abilities of the dry ones, I’ve never met one except you. I’d guess, though, that whatever pulled me out here is the same thing that created the noise you heard.” James pauses, seems to consider her words. “There’s still someone missing,” she says at last, more quietly.

“Yes, Regulus,” Sirius says, with certainty.

“Maybe,” James says, but she also sounds more certain than Remus feels. “I can help you look, but I need to go back to my camp, first.”

“We’ll come-”

“No,” Remus says sharply. Sirius looks at her in confusion.

“Why not?”

“We’re going north. You can come with us or not, but that’s what we’re doing.”

“But she can help us find Regulus,” Sirius protests.

“Or,” Remus says, “she can tie you up the second you get back to her camp. I told you, Sirius, people would kill to possess a river.”

James doesn’t say anything, and Sirius gives an offended huff.

“I possess myself,” they say, pushing to their feet. “We’re going to the camp so James can come with us.”

“Fine,” Remus says. “Do that. I’m going home.” She stands a little too quickly, attributes the ache in her stomach to the searing pain of her wing as it flaps to steady her, and not the prospect of being alone again.

“We won’t succeed, then,” James says, still sitting, still quiet.

“Remus,” Sirius pleads, holding out a hand. “It’s just a short rivulet. We’ll be back at the banks soon.”

Remus doesn’t reply, but can’t seem to make herself turn to go.

“The camp depends on me for water, I can’t leave without telling them.”

Sirius is still looking at her, and Remus feels her will crumble and blow away like a handful of sand.

“Fine, but they cannot know about Sirius.”

“That’s fine,” James says. There is no hesitation in her voice, or her movements, as she stands and packs her blanket away. “It’s probably going to break up soon, anyway, with,” James stops briefly, “with Sirius gone.”

Sirius frowns.

“Do they need water?”

James looks startled at this, and Remus sighs internally.

“Do you have any containers with you?” she asks, giving up the pretense of keeping any secrets from James.

“Just a small one for myself, but there’s a fairly large cistern on the outskirts of camp that’s been empty for months.” James has her head tilted, seemingly waiting for Remus to object again.

“Can they fill it without being seen?”

“Yes,” James says. “I can tell the captain. They’ll keep it quiet until we’re well away, and I won’t mention where we’re going.”

“Fine,” Remus says, ignores the curling flip in her stomach as Sirius smiles happily. “Let’s go, then.”

-

_At that time, the waves murmured of a tree, tall and wide as a pillar, strong and steady as a spine. It is in the light, and it is in the shadow. It is not in the land of the dead. It is not in the land of the living._

_The leaves are tattered and black, and they hang on the branches thinly. As She Who Knows All The Names approaches it, the jackal steps in her path._

_“Heed not the whispers,” he cautions._

_She Who Knows All the Names untucks the red stone amulet from her dress. She grips the knot of it tightly, the tyet sings in her blood. The jackal nods and steps aside._

_She Who Knows All the Names lays her palms against the tree. She feels the life of her husband throb within it. She embraces the tree like a lover, and it whispers to her its secret name. Leaning back, she smiles._

-

“What is it?”

Regulus starts slightly. He hadn’t been aware his discomfort was even perceptible. It’s a bit unnerving how well Lily can read him, already. He wonders if that’s a side effect of their strange connection: the palmprint smudged across her face, the way he picked up the shape of her ears and their hands are identical, if different sizes.

“Something’s changed,” he says, adding, “nothing bad,” when she tenses all over and looks toward the door.

“What, then?”

Regulus furrows his brow.

“I’m not certain, exactly. Just something at the edge of my mind. A sort of humming.”

“That doesn’t sound particularly good, either,” Lily grouses. Regulus bites down on a smile.

“I think I’m being drawn somewhere.”

“Definitely not good.”

Regulus shrugs.

“I don’t know. Could be anything, I suppose.”

Lily looks down at her hands, taps the fingers of the left one on her thigh. She doesn’t speak for a while, and Regulus settles back against the wall again, closing his eyes. They’ve been holed up here for two days, now. Lily doesn’t speak much, Regulus doesn’t eat much, so they get on in comfortable silence. He’s not sure what she does with most of her days, but Regulus sleeps nearly all the time.

He hasn’t been able to sleep, properly sleep, in years.

“Where’s it coming from?” Lily asks, pulling him out of a doze twenty minutes later. Regulus yawns, rolls his neck to get the stiffness out.

“Not the river, but back toward the river.” He pauses, considering. “Not far, though.”

“Are you going to see what it is that’s...drawing you?” Regulus looks at her, unblinking, and Lily stares back.

Another few minutes go by.

“We don’t need anything, it’s probably asking for trouble.”

This is a fair point, on Lily’s part anyway. She has enough food for several more days, and he’s gathered from the little that she’s said that she’s capable enough of replenishing that supply when it runs low. As for water, well.

“Will you let me leave?” he asks, quietly. Lily’s eyes snap back over to him, off her pack. He can’t read her expression. Or perhaps, he can read it too easily. Pain, greed, compassion, loneliness, longing, sadness, anger, they all flash ripple-fast across her face before the motion clears and it settles into blankness.

“You can do what you like,” she says flatly.

Regulus looks down at the still-white bandages wrapped around his feet.

“No,” he says quietly. “I’m not going to go see what it is that’s drawing me.”

-

"So, where to now?" Remus asks. She doesn't mean for it to come out quite as sarcastically as it does. But, well, she's tired, her shoulder is aching from dragging her wing out behind her, and she doesn't particularly feel like dealing with a stranger.

"No idea," James says, her cheery tone indicating she's benevolently ignoring Remus' crankiness. This makes Remus even more irritated, for some reason.

"I guess down some more," Sirius says thoughtfully. "That's where Remus thinks Regulus is."

"It's definitely possible," James says. "We're only about a day’s walk from the sea, here. There's not a whole lot of ground to cover."

Remus shifts, stretching her wing out to the side. She tries to settle in her body, let the rusty skeletons of her social skills come creaking back. She had sort of expected the wing to stop hurting by this point, a few days on. The broken skin around it has long healed, but the pain in her shoulder and back and the bruised tenderness of her feathers linger. It’s as if her body knows it was never meant for this, can't stop screaming out protests. Maybe in time it, like thirst, will become a distant hunger, so constant she only notices its waxing and waning, the feeling itself kept always at remove.

"Have you heard anything about Regulus?" Remus asks, breathing in and trying to anchor herself in the moment.

"Not lately. Sorry."

Remus shrugs with one shoulder, then adds, "Ah, well."

“Out of curiosity,” James says, looking toward Remus. “Which side is the wing on?”

Remus starts slightly.

“Uh. Right. My right. To the left if you’re facing me.” Remus hesitates, not sure if what she’s about to ask is rude. “How did you know?”

“Euphemia,” James says, pointing upward. “It sounds like she’s gone off for a bit, though.”

“The griffon vulture?” Remus guesses. James is a seer, after all. Maybe they can all talk to animals.”

“Yes.” James tilts her head curiously. “She said you were chosen by the gods, but that only one of your wings had come in.”

“Yeah, inconvenient, that,” Remus mutters.

Sirius has already started drifting away from the conversation. The exertion of filling an entire cistern doesn't seem to have phased them. They're bouncing slightly, pacing around James and Remus like a leashed and impatient dog.

"Do you still hear the, er, water noise?" James asks Sirius, turning her head slightly to listen to the sound of Sirius pacing. Sirius grunts in annoyance.

"No, it's gone. I still think we should go toward the sea, though."

"Okay," Remus sighs, closing her eyes and gritting her teeth a bit against the pain. She's so tired, suddenly. The cold effort of being alive again after surviving half-dead for years stings and burns along her limbs, digging sharp claws into the base of her skull.

A part of her regrets this new awakeness, wants to go back to that empty house on the hill that she haunted like a ghost.

There isn't a way back, though, not really. The dry riverbed is there, and the sand, and her footprints, but the way has closed forever. There is only forward, now. There is only here.

-

The humming has built so slowly and so insistently that Regulus does not notice Lily is speaking to him until she raises her voice.

“Pardon?” he says politely. Lily raises an eyebrow.

“Are you all right?” she asks. He hesitates, and Lily shifts slightly. Always the warrior, never quite laying down her arms.

“The pull has gotten stronger. Louder,” he says. He looks at her assessingly. Lily is strange to him. He does not know this courage without cruelty, this determination without stubbornness, not in this life. He does not know it, and it pulls at him like the memory of his river self, like his blood, like the humming in the distance. He trusts the tide of her.

Lily rolls to her feet, stalking toward him and reaching out a hand to pull him up. She looks down into his face, a wrinkle between her eyes neatly bisecting the reflection of his forefinger.

“You’re sweating,” she says. Regulus shrugs.

“It does not like to be ignored.” There is much in him which does not like to be ignored. There is much in him that ignores it anyway.

Lily sighs heavily, still looking at him. After a moment, his neck starts to hurt and he looks away. The arches and pillars make his heart ache with the thought of leaving them. Even the thought of the humming dissipating, spreading into the open air, the thought of leaving behind the echoes of their too-small voices, is not a comfort.

Regulus wonders if life is just being ripped from one home after another. He buries this thought in the river silt around his liver.

“We’ll head out at dawn,” Lily says. Regulus turns his head slowly back toward her.

“If you think it best.” She makes an impatient gesture, striding away from him. She says something, but with her back turned he can’t make it out. “What?”

Lily turns back toward him, her brow wrinkling again. _She looks worried_ , he thinks distantly.

“I think we don’t really have a choice,” she says, calmly but loudly enough that he can make it out. “You’re miserable.” Regulus shrugs, and Lily’s mouth twists. He knows this as anger, and he flinches back automatically. Lily’s face goes smooth, and she bends down to rummage in her pack. “Here,” she says. “Eat something, then try and sleep for a bit.”

Regulus takes the food hesitantly, half-expecting her to snatch it back. He trusts Lily, but trust does not soak into his skin the way it used to.

She turns away again, going to sit by her pack and leaning her head back against the wall. She closes her eyes, letting him eat safely in the darkness.

-

_At that time, the waves murmured of honor and treachery._

_She Who Knows All the Names anoints the tree, wraps bandages of linen around it. The tree which held her husband, which serves as a door between the living and the dead, is honored in this way, veiled and sacred._

_As she is doing this, the jackal watches over the body of the Lord of Silence. The jackal watches, but there are creeping things in the world of the dead. There are many who wish to possess a piece of divinity._

_The jackal is called away to a distant city of the dead. The Lord of Silence is left unguarded.  
_

-

Sirius agrees to stop for the night, more because they can tell how tired Remus is than because they particularly want to. Sirius distrusts sleep, does not like the idea of leaving this second body unguarded.

The camp comes together quickly, at least. James sits Remus down with some food and water.

“I can help,” she protests. James huffs.

“You’re practically falling over. I can hear the way your feet have been dragging the past mile. Sirius and I can take care of things.”

Remus frowns, but grumbles an assent.

“What do I do?” Sirius asks, perking up a bit at the idea of new things to learn.

“Is there enough light that you can see to clear the ground? We need a little over two meters.”

Sirius looks up. The sun is breathing its last, streaking orange and yellow brilliantly across the sky. Their breath catches a little in their chest at the vibrance of it. When Sirius looks back down, Remus is watching them. She looks away almost immediately.

“Yes,” Sirius says, frowning a little in confusion. They like when Remus looks at them, but not when she stops. “It’s mostly clear, though.” She picks up a couple medium sized rocks and moves them several meters away.

“Even out the sand a little,” James says, bending to help her do this. Sirius spreads out a thick blanket next, while James pulls a round zippered pouch from her bag.

She hands it to Sirius, smirking slightly. Sirius unzips the pouch, squawking and jumping back a bit when the tent springs open and unfolds in front of them. James laughs at them.

“You could have warned me!” Sirius exclaims, but they’re not really that annoyed. It’s been a long day, and it’s nice to see the tiny smile playing across Remus’ face.

“Lay it out on top of the blanket,” James says, still chuckling slightly. Sirius does, taking the sharp silvery things James hands her cautiously.

“Where do these go?” she asks suspiciously.

“They just anchor the tent,” James says, laughing again. “Put them next to the tent, somewhere you can reach them easily and they won’t get buried in the sand.” James crouches down again, next to the blanket this time. She feels around the top for a moment, then grasps it in two different places and shakes it out. Sirius fights the urge to jump back again as the tent pops up and into something that looks like an actual shelter. Instead, they lean forward a bit to peer down at it.

“Now the pointy bits?” they ask eagerly. James shows her the spots to hammer in the stakes and Sirius pounds away at them excitedly.

“You’re getting positively bloodthirsty,” Remus says drily. Sirius grins at her.

“Come look! I did it all myself!”

Remus laughs at James’ outraged expression, coming over and laying one hand James’ shoulder and another on Sirius’ head.

“You both did really well,” she says patronizingly.

“Sirius is sleeping on the windward side,” James grumbles.

“Do we need a fire?” Remus asks.

“Can I light a fire?” Sirius asks excitedly. Remus and James both frown at them. “What?”

“I don’t think fire and water are a good combination,” Remus says.

“A fire takes a lot of energy to start and maintain,” James says. “We don’t need one. We have thermal blankets for if it gets cold.”

“I want to see a fire!”

“No fire,” James says firmly. Remus bites down on a smile as Sirius gives an exaggerated pout.

“Unfortunately, I don’t think the puppy dog face works on people who can’t see it,” Remus points out. Sirius, forced to extreme measures, groans loudly and collapses on the sand next to the tent.

“Yes, I am immune to pouting,” James says. “Dinner?” she continues, holding up three portions of dehydrated rations.

Sirius is an excellent multitasker. They manage to both add water to the three containers of food for James and continue to wear Remus down with sulky expressions and big eyes. By the time they’ve settled down in a circle to eat, Sirius can tell Remus is starting to give in.

Halfway through the meal, Remus rolls her eyes and pulls a matchbook out of her pack. She strikes one, raising an eyebrow at Sirius. Sirius grins, reaching for the match, but Remus blows it out.

“I thought I said no fire,” James says. Sirius starts guiltily, but James is smiling slightly. “I’m blind, but my hearing and sense of smell work just fine.”

“Sorry James,” Remus mumbles.

“Puppy eyes wear you down?” James shoots back. For some incomprehensible reason, Remus tucks a hand over part of her face and looks away, elbowing James lightly in the ribs at the same time.

James laughs, and then laughs harder when Sirius gives a confused, “I don’t get it.”

“Well,” Remus says briskly. “We’d better turn in for the night, don’t you think?”

Getting them all into the tent is a bit of a challenge. Euphemia has taken off somewhere, but James doesn’t seem concerned so Sirius doesn’t worry about it.

Remus’ wing presents another level of difficulty. James, who’s the shortest of them, goes in first, wriggling into her sleeping bag and tucking herself close to the wall.

“I figure it’s best if you lie on your left and then sort of tuck the wing forward,” James calls. “Sirius can come in last and crawl under.”

Remus looks extremely reluctant to do this, but she bends down and crawls into the tent just the same. Sirius tries to go in as carefully as possible, but jostling the wing in such small quarters is inevitable. By the time they manage to get into the tent and twist into their sleeping bag, Remus’ face is stiff and withdrawn.

“I’m sorry,” Sirius whispers, stroking the feathers directly above them gently. Remus shivers.

“It’s okay.”

James is either uninterested in talking or has already fallen asleep; Sirius doesn’t turn over to look.

They watch Remus, watch as the lines of her face slowly ease, the tightness around her mouth and eyes dissipate. Sirius isn’t sure if it’s because Remus is the first human they met, or because of the Change that ties them together, or if it’s something else entirely, but they’re fascinated nonetheless.

“Does it still hurt?” Sirius keeps their voice quiet. The sun is starting to dip below the horizon and the light streams through the still-open flap of the tent. Remus’ skin is all swirled over with orange and gold, darkening into shadow where her wing hangs over them.

“Not as much. Not right now,” Remus says. She closes her eyes. It makes Sirius’ chest ache, looking at her. Watching her in light, watching her in shadow, watching her in utter darkness. She’s like the elegant lines of words carved into the sides of ancient temples, like the slow waves that lead the river into the sea, like the night sky as it guards the body of the sun. Sirius does not want to look at anything so much as they want to look at Remus. All other sights seem smaller, somehow, diminished.

Remus’ eyes flutter open, and she smiles a little.

“Aren’t you going to sleep?”

Sirius grimaces, and Remus lays her upturned palm between them.

“I don’t like sleep.”

“I know. You still need it.”

Sirius hums and tangles their fingers together.

“You’re not there, when I sleep.”

“I’m here, though,” Remus whispers. “Right next to you.”

Sirius closes their eyes, shuffling closer to Remus. They suppose that’s enough, for now.

-

Traveling with Lily is a strange experience. Regulus is used to either being alone, wandering aimlessly until need reaches out for him, be it with hands or with claws. Lily, though, Lily directs.

In the shadow of the heavy building, protected from the seeking rays of morning sun, they close and block off the door together. Lily woke him an hour before dawn from an uneasy sleep full of murmurs and the sound of sand. She gave him a map to memorize, marked with their current location. He can’t tell, yet, where the pull is going to take them, but he fears he already knows. Two hours later, he is proven right.

Even with all of Lily's forethought and planning, even with his full knowledge of the maps and the route they must take, Regulus flinches at the sight of the empty riverbed.

Lily stops, tensing, already scanning the horizon and unslinging her bow from her back.

“It’s nothing,” Regulus says, voice quiet and rough. She follows his eyeline, then slings her bow back into its holster.

“Shall we stop?” This suggestion is an offering, but it’s clear from the tension still radiating from her that she’s uncomfortable making it.

“No.” Regulus tries to look away, to keep walking, but he can’t. At his elbow, Lily is quiet. She lets him look his fill, doesn’t try to interrupt or move him. He appreciates it, appreciates the space, but it also feels overwhelming. Almost without thought, he drifts slowly closer to the riverbed, crouches down in the gentle slope of the dirt that marks where its shoreline once was.

He has never seen this place with these eyes, could never quite bear to. He visited Sirius, a few times. He has seen the sea, and the place where he changed, but never this.

“There were seven of us, once,” Regulus says. Lily is still next to him. He can feel her presence, the weight of her gaze, but he doesn’t take his eyes off the dryness in front of him. “Seven rivers, branching out from one source, coming together in the same place, but seven. Sirius and I were the farthest to the east. We came from the same mother stream, and were closed together for a time.” He pauses, glances over at Lily. She clears her throat, looks from his face to the riverbed in front of them.

“Yes. People thought maybe that would slow down the drying, diverting some of the rivers into the same course.”

Regulus digs his hands into the dirt, letting it run through his fingers and return to the earth.

“That was after she was already gone,” he says.

It was strange, being pressed into the same channel as Sirius. In the immediate aftermath, waking on the months-abandoned bed of his own river, he had wondered if that was what made his river-self give up. It was stranger still, being suddenly shut out from the loud tumbling presence of Sirius. They had grown so loud around Regulus that he’d barely been able to hear the weakening cries of the other three.

It is strange still, strange and empty, to have only one being. To not be seven, to not even be two.

“She?” Lily asks. “Do you mean Andromeda?”

Regulus stands suddenly, backs away from the river-bed. He feels like a jackal, suddenly, nosing at a freshly dug grave.

“Let’s keep going,” he says, not bothering to check if Lily is following. His chest aches, too-full, and he lets the throbbing noise of whatever is drawing him blot out thought for a while.

-

Sirius has gotten more and more tense as their walk has gone on, so Remus is unsurprised when they jerk her to a stop.

“Something’s wrong,” they say. Remus glances over at James, who is frowning and running a thumb over the snakes carved into the head of her staff.

“What is it?” Remus rolls her shoulders, trying to loosen the tension that’s built in them as they’ve walked.

“I don’t know,” Sirius says. They glance over at Remus, frustration written plainly across their face. Remus bites her lip.

“We’re still following the riverbed, for the most part. According to the map, we should be nearing the outskirts of-”

Sirius’ head snaps around suddenly, and they take off running. James mutters a curse.

“Remus?” she says.

“I’m still here.”

“Try to keep them in sight, okay? I’ll keep heading straight north,” James says, unclipping her compass from her belt and running a hand over the display to orient herself.

“I’ll be back,” Remus promises, before running as fast as she can after Sirius. Her wing drags in the sand behind her, so she flares it out to the side. It throws off her balance a bit, but she can still go fairly quickly as long as Sirius doesn’t go too far.

Less than three minutes later, she sees the edges of a cluster of buildings, sees Sirius whipping around the edge of one. She calls out to them to stop, to slow down, but Sirius doesn’t reappear. Remus sighs, gritting her teeth against the pain in her shoulder and back and the sharp ache of her lungs.

She finally comes upon Sirius, stopped dead in the middle of an intersection and staring at the front of a massive library. Panting, Remus reaches for their hand and firmly clasps it in her own.

“Sirius,” she says, exasperated. “What are you doing?” Sirius shakes their head but doesn’t say anything, still looking at the library. Remus takes a deep breath, trying to steady herself. “We have to go back for James,” she says.

“I-” Sirius says, so quiet Remus can barely hear them. No other words appear to be forthcoming. Remus walks around to stand between Sirius and the building, forcing them to look at her.

“Hey,” she keeps her voice low. “Can you talk to me, please?”

“Something’s wrong,” Sirius whispers. They look on the verge of tears, shaking and still not quite meeting Remus’ gaze.

“Okay,” Remus says soothingly. “We will deal with whatever it is. Right now, though, I need you to come with me.” Sirius shakes their head vigorously.

“It’s here. I have to be here.”

“I’m not leaving you here by yourself,” Remus says sharply. “Look, we’ll come back, but we’ve got to go get James.”

Sirius looks longingly back over at the building, but lets Remus tug them back the way they came without further protest.

Fortunately, they aren’t very far inside town. It doesn’t take long to find James and get back to the deserted intersection.

In spite of their insistence on the location’s importance, though, Sirius doesn’t seem to know what to do once they get there. They stop again, looking at the library but not making any move to go inside.

“Should we,” Remus says hesitantly, “should we do anything?”

James taps the base of her staff against the asphalt, then goes rigid all over.

“It’s,” she hesitates. “Sirius, I think it’s one of the other rivers.”

Sirius lets out a sort of choked gasp, but still doesn’t move. Remus looks at the building again, searching for some sort of sign.

“Should we go in?” she asks, after a moment of silence. “I mean,” she glances hesitantly at Sirius, and then at James, carefully weighing her words. She knows Sirius, and trusts them, but isn’t too keen on encountering any of the other rivers. Who knows what kind of changes they’re capable of, or what years as humans will have done to them.

_Bit late for second thoughts now,_ Remus scolds herself. _What’s the point of this entire journey, if not to find the other rivers?_

With more confidence than she feels, she reaches for Sirius’ hand again, then tugs them over to James. With the three of them linked together, Remus feels slightly better.

“Let’s go,” she says.

-

The walls are scrawled so densely and so variously with life that Regulus feels like he’s drowning. It’s too much, this flowing in with no outlet, no delta, not even little rivulets streaming off. The words and feelings and images surge and crush against the inside of his skull, squeezing and pressing their meanings into Regulus. He feels like a stone tablet, so written and overwritten that none of the words are legible any more.

“Regulus,” he hears from a distance. Lily’s face swims in front of him, concern stamped across it.

Regulus starts laughing and cannot stop.

-

_The water takes._

_The waves pull the body of The Lord of Silence down into their depths. The river has its own silence, one so profound it seeps into bones, breaking them apart with the slow determination of centuries._

_This is not his fate._

_His body is split apart, torn into pieces by the crocodiles who would be better served by keeping him whole._

_He is diminished, and they all go away unsatisfied._

-

Regulus drifts back into consciousness in slow rolling waves. He feels shattered and shredded apart inside, but in a way that is bruised-tender healing.

A face hovers above him. Not Lily. Fear tries to start at the base of his spine, but a strange calmness washes over him. A sense of peace, one he has not felt since the drying.

He sits up. The person crouching over him moves back slightly, then surges in and presses their foreheads together.

“Sirius?” he whispers. Sirius wraps their arms around him and lets their head drop onto his shoulder.

“Regulus,” they say, quietly.

He breaths in the salt-smell of them, lets it settle like the dying tide in his bones. His muscles feel weak and shaky, the words on the walls trying to press into him again, but he holds tightly to Sirius and feels truly present in this body for the first time. Like this is a life worth having, worth saving, worth digging his heels and fingernails into.

“I didn’t think I’d see you again,” he says, almost ashamed of the words, of his loss of faith. Sirius squeezes him one final time, so hard it makes his spine grind together and his ribs ache, before they pull back.

They grin at him, so different and new and yet so utterly Sirius. Sirius, who overflowed their banks with eager abandon, who rushed into the sea headlong, who kept on running when the rest of them had dried. Sirius, who thrums with life even now, a river running through their veins, fast and vital. Regulus wants to close his eyes against the sight of them, almost. He feels swept away.

He smiles back, a tentative thing, and lets Sirius pull him to his feet.

-

Lily expected Sirius to look similar to Regulus. Instead, they look more like their traveling companion. Standing shoulder to shoulder, the two are exactly the same height. Their skin tone is the same, warmer and darker than her own and much darker than Regulus'. Their features are similar as well, although Remus' are sharper and Sirius has a softer face. Their hair, too, is different. Sirius' is long and beautifully springy, while Remus has hers cut so short her head is nearly shaved. Sirius is shorter than Lily by a few inches, but Regulus is still smaller. This is all she observes before she jerks her attention away from the reunion in the centre of the room, feeling rude and intrusive.

Sirius’ companion is standing against the wall, arms crossed in front of her. She had introduced herself quietly when they barreled into the room, Sirius practically shoving Lily aside to get to Regulus. The other woman with them, Lily thinks Remus said she was called James, had disappeared back up to the surface almost immediately.

Lily feels a bit wrong-footed, unsure whether to leave or stay. She doesn’t know these other people, not even Sirius, really, and she doesn’t know whether she trusts them.

Sirius pulls Regulus back to his feet just as James slips back into the room. Lily turns to look over at her, but her attention is promptly claimed by Sirius.

“Who are you?” Sirius asks, looking at Lily curiously. Lily stiffens.

“Sirius,” Remus says, exasperatedly. “Don’t be rude.”

“I’m not being rude.” Sirius is still staring fixedly at Lily and Lily tries very hard not to fidget. “I just want to know who she is.”

“I think we should get out of here,” James says, “before anything else.”

“Why?” Lily asks, on her guard a bit.

James hesitates, fiddling with the head of her staff.

“I agree,” Regulus says, after a moment of silence. “Let’s go up to the surface; we can talk there.”

Sirius frowns, but follows the rest of them willingly enough. Everyone seems to relax a bit once they’re out in the open. Well, everyone except Lily. The exposed position, the afternoon sunlight on her transparent skin, makes her antsy. She stays back in the shadow of the library, nearly pressed up against the walls. Remus looks at her, then quickly away.

“Right, well, I think we’d better take stock,” Remus starts diplomatically. “Regulus, we’ve been trying to find you. Or, well, Sirius has. James and I are along for the ride a bit.” Remus coughs awkwardly, shaking her head. “In any case, how did you end up here? Do you two belong to a camp, or...” Remus trails off, seemingly waiting for someone to pick up the thread of conversation. When no one does for a moment, she hunches into herself slightly.

Lily looks at James, who has her head tilted slightly and is frowning in concentration, and then at Regulus and Sirius, who are leaning into each other and don’t seem overly concerned with anything else that’s happening. Finally, she looks back over at Remus, who is watching her again. This time Remus doesn’t look away, just raises an eyebrow. Lily sighs.

“No, we don’t belong to a camp.” Even this much information feels like too much disclosure, but they all seem to be waiting for her to continue. Lily weighs the costs and benefits of trust quickly in her head, but the promise of replenishable water and the continued safety of herself and Regulus easily overbalance the possibility of retreat. “Regulus felt-” even determined to continue as she is, she needs to pause to consider her words, “-pulled here.”

“I’m not surprised,” James mutters. Lily looks at her sharply.

“What does that mean?” she demands. James purses her lips, but it’s Regulus who answers.

“It’s,” he starts, then pauses, breath hitching. “It’s a grave.”

James relaxes slightly at his words but Lily doesn’t notice. Her eyes are fixed on Regulus.

“A grave?”

Regulus sighs, shrinking a bit more into Sirius’ side. They wrap their arm more tightly around him, tilting their face down and burying it in his curls.

“I think we’d better sit down,” he says quietly.

-

She was the first to wake, water sluicing and boiling with the red fervor of creation. The riverbed-turned-womb held her tight for a few perfect moments, balanced on her back and looking up through an inch of water at the sky.

_Up_ , just enough time to feel that strangeness. The novelty of up, not forward or downward. Up and not vapor, not steam. Up and still self. Just enough time, and then the water sunk down into her, became blood to stream through this new body.

Her star of stars glares down, red and bright, but another eye watches, redder and brighter.

_Ill luck_ , she thinks, _for the eye of the goddess is open and angry._

It does not trouble her overmuch. Andromeda is used to ill luck. In any case, the worst has already come. It seems inevitable, now, that this would be the result of slow long years of drying with little return, the rain dwindling and then vanishing entirely. What is a river without water? Only clay. What is Andromeda without water? Only clay, formed on the wheel of the Divine Potter into this body.

She turns east, some bone-deep instinct for survival pushing her forward. She does not know what will come.

-

_Only water is eternal_ is painted in thick black letters on the library wall. It flies from the mouth of a bird. The _water_ is encircled, safe.

No one else will come back into the library, but Remus cannot resist the temptation of answers, of knowledge.

She understands the reluctance of the others. Understands that James can feel the weight of death crawling down her throat and pressing against her lungs, in a way that she cannot. That Regulus and Sirius can barely stand in the presence of this place, the heft of it; where their fellow river had come to die, where they feel for the first time their own fresh mortality. Where the words that bind and free them all, over and over, flutter and whisper like grains of sand whipped up into a frenzy.

Only Remus has come back, with Lily posted as a sentry on the stairs leading down into the room of books. None of them know what to expect, what power or terror might be lurking down here.

Remus finds:

_I am the Mistress of the House of Books, she who serves as a scribe for the seven. I write the history of myself and my people._

_..._

_When the crocodiles swallowed up the Lord of Silence, they had cause to regret it._

_Before the eye of the moon was fully opened upon them, the loss of the boat of the sun is felt. Without the Lord of Silence to guide it, the boat remains lost among the field of reeds. The sun can neither rise nor set, and all the earth is left to a slow, creeping coldness._

_The floodwaters build and build, covering the land with no warmth to check them. The One Before Whom Evil Trembles turns her face away. She refuses to drink the excess._

_The eye of the Lord of Divine Words is cold without the light of his brother. The jackal is kept busy. The Feather of Balance is weighed against many souls._

_She Who Knows All the Names speaks the secret names of the crocodiles. She calls them to account. This is their plea:_

_The Lord of Silence does not give us enough. We are all hungry, and he has the whole of the sun._

_She Who Knows All the Names looks at the crocodiles._

_“And now that you have torn open the sun, are you filled?”_

_They are silent._

_“And your children, are there any pieces left for them?”_

_They are silent._

_She Who Knows All the Names knots up her hair to stop the rain. She stands in the small piece of dry land there is left. Behind her is a tree, strong enough to trap a god between life and death._

_She does not let her tears fall. Her husband has died many times. She has always brought him back._

_Gathered before her are thirteen river rocks and the feather of a kite. She Who Eases the Way has fetched her these river rocks, the bones of the Lord of Silence. The feather comes from her own back._

_She Who Knows All the Names rebuilds her husband. His body is impermanent, he dies again and again. He returns again and again._

_There are four necessities, to call the Lord of Silence back to this new body. One, a drop of blood. His heart, the measure of his will. Two, a box. It holds his shadow, that which is always with him. Three, the writing of his secret name. It was written long ago by Mother Night, and only She Who Knows All the Names has read it. Four, the breath of him, carefully fed and watered. These four will summon back his selfhood._

_The One Before Whom Evil Trembles gives the blood of her heart. It holds her rage, her power, the red in her of life and death. She roars, and the cut upon her palm closes itself._

_The Lord of Divine Words stands as shadow to his brother. He has grown with him, from child to god. He has watched over his brother through his own waxing and waning._

_She Who Eases the Way carries his breath in her lungs. She nourishes it, gives it strength and force._

_She Who Knows All the Names wraps these things in the papyrus of his name. Alone on the dry piece of land, by the tree that was his spine, she whispers his name. He stands up._

_..._

_These are the old stories, whispered long ago on our banks. This is all I have to leave. These are the secrets the river keeps.  
_

Remus jumps as a hand closes over her shoulder. Her wing flares automatically in surprise, knocking into the pile of books on the chair next to her and toppling it.

“Sorry,” Lily says. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“Oh,” Remus pushes herself away from the table, flustered. “Sorry. I lost track of time.”

Lily is watching her thoughtfully. Remus turns, straightening the books.

“They sent me down to see what was happening.” Remus stills, her palms pressed flat against the table. “What’s wrong?” Lily says more sharply. Remus gives a shaky sigh, turning to face her. They have to move out into the room a bit, away from the table, so Remus has space to fit her wing.

“I’m not entirely sure,” Remus says. “I think Andromeda was here for a while. Possibly one or more of the other rivers as well.”

“Okay,” Lily says slowly. “So?”

She seems to realize this comes across as rude after she says it, but doesn’t soften the words. She just crosses her arms and looks at Remus. Remus bites her lip. She feels behind her for the book, smooth leather and ragged at the edges. _The Place of the Cure of the Soul_ , is inked on the flyleaf.

Lily raises an eyebrow.

“Her journal?” she guesses. Remus shakes her head, then nods. A flicker of irritation crosses Lily’s face. “Well, is it or isn’t it?”

“It doesn’t have her name in it, and the writing could be one person, or several. I can’t tell.”

“Well, is it important?” Lily asks impatiently.

“I think it might be,” Remus says. She grimaces. There’s a part of her that wants to just put the book back, hide it even. For all that it could be helpful, it could be nothing. It could be worse than nothing, it could be false hope.

“Let’s go outside. You can debate it up there. This place gives me the creeps.”

-

Sirius is considering charging back down the stairs. As horrible as being in that sepulchre had been, it’s worse to have Remus down there, out of sight.

Before they can convince themself to leave Regulus and go after her, though, the library door swings open and Lily comes striding back out. Remus is lagging behind her, nearly catching her wing in the door she's moving so slowly. Lily huffs impatiently and grabs the door.

"Sorry," Remus mutters.

"What happened?" Sirius gives Regulus a final squeeze and charges over to Remus. "You were gone for ages."

"Yeah," Remus looks uneasily around the group. "Sorry about that." She stops talking, but doesn't really look like she's finished. Sirius tilts her head, reaching out for Remus' hands.

"What's wrong?"

Remus bites her lip, still not meeting Sirius' eyes.

"Remus," Regulus says softly. Remus looks over at him, and Sirius pushes down a surge of annoyance. Why won't Remus look at them? "Did she leave something behind?"

Remus sighs, a jagged, broken thing.

"Yes. Or, I'm not sure if it was her, really. It could be nothing. It could just be nonsense."

"Can I see?" Regulus asks. Remus hesitates slightly, then lets go of Sirius' hands to cross over to Regulus. Sirius folds their arms and spins on their heel to watch her.

Regulus takes the little book from Remus carefully, Hands gentle on the cracked spine, he opens it and begins to speak, almost to himself.

"At that time, the waves murmured of-"

"Stop," Sirius says sharply. They cross the little circle that has formed, shove their way in next to Regulus. They don't understand what is happening, why those words are here, in this strange place.

Sirius looks down at the words in the book, but the lines and swirls of the text are strange to them. They do not combine to make sounds. They do not show what Regulus is saying. They do not sing inside Sirius like birds.

Wordlessly, Regulus flips through the book halfway, showing Sirius a different page. The breath catches in their lungs.

These words, they can read. These words are the careful writings of the snake upon the sand, these are the words of the river.

Sirius and Regulus stand over the book, motionless, looking down at that first page and trapped by the odd familiarity of it. A river does not speak, does not read, does not write. And yet, now, they do. They can speak, and walk, and read. The language of it pulses through them, like water and just as fast, just as fluid, just as all-encompassing.

Sirius knows the stories without reading. They have been spelled out in river stones, in clay, in the before of the primordial waters. Water came first, all else is after.

They read the book, still, with Regulus. There is something about these stories-as-human that is different from these stories-as-river. Humanness is not reading, or walking, or speaking, it is something beyond these things.

The stories jangle and thrum through Sirius' bones, through their blood. It hurts somewhere deep within them, sharp and pricking like a thorn.

"What does it mean?" Sirius asks, finally, voice hoarse.

In spite of all this inner upheaval, seeing Remus looking back at them is a relief.

"I'm not sure," Remus starts, "but I think it might be what we need to bring back the rain."

"What?" Lily snaps. Sirius doesn't look away from Remus to see how the others are reacting. Lily takes the journal from their hands, flipping back to the beginning and starting to read.

"Is anyone going to explain what's going on?" James asks, sounding slightly impatient. Remus starts guiltily, looking over at James.

"Sorry. Uh, so, there's a journal, of sorts. It's a narrative of some old stories. Well," Remus amends, "really old stories."

"What does that have to do with rain?" Lily asks, closing the book with a snap. Remus winces, and Sirius briefly takes their eyes off Remus to glare at Lily. Lily ignores them.

"It could be nothing," Remus cautions.

"Well we've got nothing now," James points out. "It hasn't rained in years. Not here, anyway. All we have are the seers finding groundwater, and the river. Now, we don't even have the river." James grimaces. "I mean, technically you two are the river, but you know what I mean."

"Yes," Regulus says softly.

"So anything's better than that, right?" James asks.

"Yes," Regulus says again. "I'll do it."

"No," Sirius snaps, head whipping around toward Regulus. He looks a little frightened, but they don't care. "There is no way I'm letting you."

"It makes sense," Regulus protests. "I've had this life for years. You've barely started."

"Do what?" Lily asks, anger edging dangerously into her tone. "Sirius, what is he talking about?"

"I should have thought of this before," Regulus says, staring at the ground. One hand is clenched at his side, the other digging into his thigh.

"Thought of what."

Lily's tone is so flat and terrifying that they all look at her. Sirius takes in her displeased expression, then looks around the circle. James still looks bemused and slightly impatient, Regulus looks annoyed with himself and possibly like he might start crying, but it's Remus' face that cuts Sirius open. She looks devastated, like she wants to crawl into herself and just stop existing.

"The rivers tell many stories," Sirius says. They're all looking at them now, attention fixed. "But there is one that repeats over and over. A river can never die, not truly. The sun changes, the moon changes, the earth changes, the riverbed changes, the towers rise and fall, the animals come and go, the plants sprout and die and sprout and die, while the river is. The river is split and broken and harvested and churned and it gives and gives and takes and takes but it never dies." A little silence falls after they say this, broken by another impatient noise from Lily.

"I still don't get what you're trying to say."

Sirius sighs.

"Something is wrong. Something has thrown off the cycle. The river is changing in the wrong way, changing us and changing you. That is what the story is about."

"About change?" Lily asks.

"About restoring balance," they say. "That's probably what happened here. Andromeda tried to complete the ritual to restore balance."

"What ritual?" James asks sharply.

"Sacrifice," Sirius says. They shrug. "Or, sort of. Things have gone wrong, here. They're all out of order. Water isn't cycling correctly. It's getting trapped, somewhere else where we can't access it. So, one of us has to go to the place where it's trapped."

They can see the exact moment when Lily and James realize what they mean. Horror flashes across James' face, and Lily looks almost panicked.

"Are you talking about dying?" Lily asks. "One of you has to die?"

"It’s not that big a deal," Sirius says.

"If it's not that big a deal, why can't I do it," Regulus shoots back at them. Sirius glares at him. He's always been so damn stubborn.

"I just came into this life," they say. "It makes more sense for it to be me. I've more recently had to navigate the change."

"That doesn't mean anything and you know it."

"And I'm stronger than you," Sirius continues, ignoring Regulus' interruption. "The ritual will have more power and chance of success if I'm the one."

"We're not going to let either of you just up and die," James says. "What is this supposed ritual anyway? If Andromeda did it, why didn't that work? Why should it be any different if we do it?"

"It's not so much the doing it as the coming back," Remus says, sighing. "She wouldn't be able to do that bit by herself. That also might be why the ritual didn't work properly. She didn't return to the form she left. She's neither human nor river, and the scales are still out of balance."

"See," Sirius says, jabbing a finger at Remus triumphantly. "Remus agrees I'd be the best choice."

"That is not what I said, Sirius," Remus snaps. Sirius opens their mouth to argue, but Remus holds up a hand. "We don't even know that this will do anything. You could just die, and there could still be no rain, and then you'd just be gone. It's not," Remus stops, gritting her teeth, "it's not a decision you can just make."

"Why not?"

Sirius looks around the circle. Remus looks hurt and a little frightened, Regulus is still hunched in on himself, James looks like she's hoping something will show up that she can angrily whack over the head with her staff, and even Lily is looking at Sirius slightly pityingly.

"It's not just about you," Lily says, as if Sirius is being purposefully obtuse.

"Of course it's about me," Sirius says. "It's my life, isn't it? It's my change."

Lily raises an eyebrow "If it's that simple, why won't you let Regulus do it?"

Sirius feels strange, all of a sudden. It's hurting and cold in their chest, like the sun has been hidden behind the clouds for days and the water is mourning the lack of it.

"Because he can't," Sirius says. "I won't let him."

Regulus sighs as Lily rolls her eyes.

"Yeah, well, that's how these three feel about you."

Sirius frowns.

They do not think of themselves as a being that death can touch. It is a strange realization, to understand that they are looked at as human, as mortal, as something that decays and dies. They push this confusing tangle of feelings away, focusing on what matters.

"Anyway, it has to be one of us. It might as well be me as Regulus."

"You can't just-" Lily starts, then sighs. "Fine. I don’t know why I’m arguing. Yeah. I think it should be you, too."

James makes a disgruntled noise. “This just doesn’t seem fair, or like a reasonable sacrifice for us to ask you to make.”

“We don’t exactly have a choice, though, do we?” Regulus says quietly. “If there’s even a chance of saving so many lives...it’s not really a decision. It needs to be done.”

“By me,” Sirius clarifies. “Not by you.”

“I think,” Remus says. She stops, taking a breath to steady the waver in her voice. “I think we should focus on the second part of the ritual. If we can’t figure out at least a possible way to bring whichever of you,” Sirius opens their mouth but Remus shoots a quelling glare at them, “back, then the sacrifice is pointless anyway.”

“That seems reasonable,” Lily says. James is scowling but doesn’t argue, and Regulus just looks tired.

Remus, though...Remus is looking at Sirius with wide-open pleading eyes. It sets them back, suddenly, the thought of never seeing those eyes again. Or, not precisely that. They could see Remus as a river, reflect her, hold her image. They could hear her speak, let the words wash in little ripples across their surface. But there is something different, now, something that would be lost in a return to water. There is something in Remus that has augmented Sirius, pushed them higher and faster and channeled them through this new life.

Sirius does not want to lose this feeling that they cannot understand, or grasp. That is more and deeper than water. That makes them feel, for the first time, small.

“Where do we start?” Lily asks, breaking into Sirius’ thoughts. Remus looks over at Lily, and Sirius take a deep, shaky breath. The ritual first. There will be time for second thoughts later.

-

James tilts her head back against the couch, straightening her legs on the floor. There’s more than enough seating for all of them in the deserted house near the library they’ve adopted as a temporary home base, but she likes being on the floor. Being inside at all, not in a tent or under the open sky, feels sort of claustrophobic. Everything’s so loud in the confined space, footsteps on the hardwood floor, the sounds of breathing, the scrape of cabinets opening and closing as Sirius snoops through the kitchen.

It’s slightly better now that Remus and Sirius have gone to try and get together some food for the group. The thick tension that has hung over their planning session has dissipated a bit, and James feels slightly more able to focus. Only slightly, though.

She wonders if her own reaction to the prospect of loss is disproportionate. She’s barely known Sirius for a few days, and Regulus even less. And she’s lost so many people. Her mother, the barest feeling of warmth on the edge of her memory. Her father, gone when she was barely eighteen and still trying to find some sort of direction. The commander of the first camp she joined, the one other seer she’s ever met, the young girl who used to giggle and try to pet Euphemia, so many dead from lack of water, lack of shelter, the heat, the sand, the violence born of desperation.

Another loss, and one so slight, one for such a purpose, should not be difficult. But it is. It feels like too much. That Sirius, who thrums with life and presses forward with boundless curiosity, who swings their arms while they walk, who goes toward death laughing, should be gone. That Regulus, soft and forgiving even as he shakes with fear, so gentle that he’s convinced the toughest woman James has ever met to trust him, barely surviving and finally granted a little kindness, should have his life snatched away. That either of them will be left behind to mourn the other.

James does not want to bear this sorrow, too.

“I think we should sort out who’s in charge of what,” Lily says. James can still hear Remus and Sirius moving about in the kitchen, but she feels Regulus stir next to her. He doesn’t say anything, though, and Lily makes an impatient noise.

“You’re probably right,” James says with a sigh. “Well, Regulus, you know these stories the best of any of us. What do we need?”

“Well. A shadow, of some sort. The journal might work, or a river rock from Sirius’ bed.”

“I have one of those,” James says, rummaging through her pockets and producing the rock.

“Oh,” Regulus sounds disappointed.

“We don’t need to use it. We could go back and get another. It might take a few days, but we could do it.”

“It’s not that,” Regulus says, sighing. “I just, this makes it a bit more real, doesn’t it?”

They’re all silent for a moment, then Lily clears her throat.

“Well, that’s the connection to the past bit sorted, between the journal and the rock, don’t you think?”

“Probably,” Regulus says miserably. He sighs again. “Well, we might need something from this life, too. The one they’re wanting to come back to.”

“We’ll come back to that,” Lily says briskly. “What about protection? For while they’re....wherever they’re going?”

“Blood,” Regulus says.

“Just anyone’s or?” James asks.

“I don’t know. It’s probably best if it’s the person with the strongest will. The one of us who’s,” Regulus stumbles over his words slightly, “most capable of protecting them.”

James tries not to smile.

“I’m guessing that’s Lily,” she says drily. Lily seems like she could take on an army single-handed, has apparently survived in the desert alone for over a year, and, according to Regulus, is an accomplished huntress.

“If you think it will work,” Lily says.

“What can I do?” James asks, sallying bravely into the embarrassed silence that follows.

“Well,” Regulus says thoughtfully, “I think you’ll be most helpful guarding the,” he stumbles slightly over the words, “the body.”

“Is it-, will we have a body?” James grimaces, hesitating slightly, “How is this death thing going to happen?”

“I’m not sure,” Regulus says miserably. He takes a deep, shaky breath. “Whether we do or not, though, someone needs to be taking care of them. If I’m standing in for the past, and Lily is offering protection, someone else needs to be the guide.”

“What does that entail?” James asks. “What do I need to do?”

“Well,” Regulus says, “we’ll need to have a sort of tomb. Or a marker of location. Where we can perform the ritual, where we can wait, where we can keep the ceremonial objects safely. That’s where you’ll be. Lily and I can be there as well, for strength and memory, but you need to be focused on the perimeters. Making sure things that are not Sirius don’t come through, and that we can address anything that obstructs their path.” Regulus sounds more confident as he continues talking. “You’re a seer, right? That’s lucky. You’ll have more sense of what’s happening to Sirius, if they’re getting lost or off the correct path.”

“I’ll do that, then,” James says firmly. Regulus reaches out tentatively and squeezes James’ hand. James grins and squeezes back. “We can do this,” she says firmly.

“I hope so,” Regulus whispers. He clears his throat. “Other than that, we just need food and water to nourish them while they’re away from their body, and, well,” he hesitates again.

“What?” Lily asks, tone gentle.

“You had all better eat this food because we worked really hard to make it,” Sirius says.

“We,” Remus laughs.

“Yes,” Sirius sniffs. “I was a very important part of the food preparation, Remus.”

“Sitting on the counter being distracting is important, then?”

“Vital.”

“Just eat,” Remus grumbles, but she sounds like she’s smiling.

-

Remus is not thinking about the possibility of Sirius not coming back, not even when it is laid starkly out in front of her. She does not think of it as they eat, as the steps of the ritual click neatly into place, as every newly revealed piece pushes them all toward the same inevitable conclusion.

This was always meant to happen.

Remus does not think of Sirius dying, even as the reality of it slowly leeches away the thin pretense that they won’t go through with the ritual. Remus thinks only of tasks, numbers them, orders them in her own mind, shuts out the pain of her wing and the sadness in Regulus’ eyes and the fever-bright determination that makes Sirius’ hands move through the air like a pair of hummingbirds.

Remus does not think of death, does not think of death, does not- 

The other three are ready, the ritual is all prepared, now it’s just Remus and Sirius. They’re on the shore of the lake, and even with how much it has shrunk the sight of that much water in one place makes Remus ache all over. She wants to go in Sirius’ place, wants it with the fervency of one who has known the dry click of her own throat for far too long.

“It’ll be fine,” Sirius says, with a confidence that is probably false.

“Stop,” Remus swallows around a lump in her throat. “It’s just us here. You don’t have to pretend to be brave.”

Sirius grins at her.

“I’m always brave, Remus.”

“Yeah, well. I’m not,” Remus mutters, trying to breathe slowly enough that she won’t start crying.

“Sure you are.” Sirius grabs her hands. Remus snorts.

“I’m not. All I want right now is just to take you and put you somewhere safe. Somewhere you don’t have to do this.” Sirius opens their mouth and Remus raises her voice. “I know that’s selfish, and silly. I know there isn’t a way to hide from this, or change what’s happening, or go anyway but forward. It’s still what I want.”

She looks challengingly at Sirius, who gives her a sad little grin.

“That’s why you’re braver than me, though. It’s harder to face losing someone else, someone you....someone you care about, than it is to lose yourself, isn’t it? But you’re still here.”

Remus bites down hard on the inside of her cheek, then pulls one hand away from Sirius, plucking one of her feathers and pushing it into Sirius’ hand.

_I’d go in your place in a heartbeat, if I could_ , she thinks.

“Here,” she says instead, fiercely. “You need something from this life? Hold onto this. Come back to this.”

Sirius presses their left hands together around the feather, still looking at Remus.

“See you in a bit, then,” they say. Remus squeezes their hands, letting go and making sure Sirius has the feather tucked safely in their pocket.

“I won’t forget my part,” Remus says. “Don’t forget yours.”

Sirius smiles at her, then flings their arms around her and pulls her into a hug. It hurts, they’re holding so hard, and Remus never wants that hurt to stop.

It does, though, too soon, and Sirius is grinning again and backing away.

“I’ll come back,” they say, waving one final time before turning and running into the sea.

-

At that time, the waves murmured of a choice, of a return, of a leave-taking.

Being in this place, the salt of ghostly water and cold-ridged mud thickly slathered into a retreating shoreline, feels, already, like death.

It’s strange, being perched on the edge of this disintegration. A kind of death Sirius thought they could never have. Water never dies, at least, it never used to. It just changes, again and again.

Maybe this death, like the last, is just another change. Sirius doesn’t know.

Sirius strides out into the water. With purpose, first, and then slowly. The land drops away underneath them, softening into cool water that caresses and lifts their body.

They do not look back. This leave-taking is difficult, for all it is chosen.

The water enfolds them slowly, slipping into their lungs, clouding their eyes, stopping up their ears. Being part of this again, even in the wrong place and in this body that jerks and burns with the desire to keep living, feels like coming home.

Water, over, under, inside, steaming across their fingers and searing through their lungs. It’s a feeling so beautiful that Sirius knows it means their life is running out.

Their last thought is of the sun. Sundeath. Sunbirth. Mother Night. _Then who births the sun._

_Sirius,_ shouted in Remus’ voice, sinking into their bones just before the world drops away.

-

It drops, awkward and gangly on ostrich legs, red as fresh blood. The desert stretches out in front of it, endless and dry and empty.

Well, not quite empty.

Sirius’ consciousness surges and settles abruptly as they see Remus, walking out of the desert toward them. _Yet another new body,_ Sirius thinks with dismay. They try to call out but all they can do is give a low sort of hiss.

Remus doesn’t seem to notice, she continues walking toward Sirius and stops a few meters away, turning west. Sirius tries to go toward her, but cannot seem to move more than half a step before some unseen force stops them.

The light is strange here, diffuse but colder and harsher than sunlight. When Sirius looks up, they cannot see the sun. Only the moon is visible, shadowed and burning on the edges.

With a jolt, the ground underneath them rises, sand streaming and piling in the gaps between large square stones. Sirius flaps their wings in alarm, but the stones do not rise far before stopping. They could probably safely step off the side and down into the sand, were it not for the same strange force keeping their feet rooted to the stone.

Sirius looks west again, sees eight stones lined up ahead. This time, though, they don’t see only Remus. The squares have started to fill, creatures pulling their way up and crouching in readiness on the stones of the massive Senet board.

James is standing on the eighth square, staff held crosswise in a defensive position. A vulture is huddled on the next, long neck swinging back and forth as it surveys the rest of them. Lily, arms folded and glowering straight ahead, comes after. A lioness, head high and regal, paces impatiently between Lily and Regulus, who is watching the cheetah on his other side. Sirius’ looks across the jackal between them at Remus again, who is still not looking at them.

The others all look curiously blank, dressed in flowing black that moves slightly, in spite of their stillness.

Sirius cannot feel a breeze.

A low growl starts behind them and Sirius turns slowly. A crocodile is curled onto the single square behind Sirius. Its tail swings from side to side, bumping up against the edge over and over. It seems that whatever force is keeping Sirius on their own stone is affecting the crocodile as well.

The seven vowels are sung, and a harmonious rattle comes from the sky. They begin.

Sirius does not know what is directing the game’s progress. They cannot see lots being cast, cannot tell what is prompting the others to move.

For their part, there is only the strange force. It pushes them forward, then stops them. Once or twice, when the jackal or the cheetah land on the same square, Sirius is sucked downward in a rushing swirl of wind and stinging sand, forced back onto another square.

The other pieces hover near them, protecting them with proximity whenever possible. Sirius is urged forward, into the fifteenth square.

The red feathers shudder and fall away, so quickly and so unexpectedly that Sirius shivers. They try to wrap their arms protectively around themself, but cannot. Before they have processed that they are no longer in the body of an ostrich, they are in the body of a tree. They remain frozen, head tossed back and covered with leaves, body wrapped in bark.

The game continues.

Sirius floats across the board in tree form, edging nearer and nearer to the end. They are among the birds, nearly to safety, when they are thrown back again, re-emerging on the fifteenth square.

The leaves rustle and fall, and this time Sirius is not surprised. They find themself human again, but wrapped up so tightly that movement is hardly possible.

Even through the thick bandages wrapped around their head, Sirius can hear the rushing of the water, can feel the dread build as they shift inexorably toward the twenty-seventh square. The House of Water is unlucky. There is something wrong with this stream, the water turned from necessity to poison.

Sirius tries to back up, to change course, but it is futile. They tumble into the water, which roars loudly in their ears as the bandages unravel and disappear.

They are left, floating in a silent, dimly lit pool. The water is so still around them, it feels like filmy-thin cloth. It flows in and out of their lungs like air. It is only by the slow clumsiness of their own movements that Sirius knows they have returned to the water.

The quiet of it is frightening, oppressive. This water is wrong: too deep and silent, too dark. This is not the river. This is not even the sea.

_Sirius._

It is not a sound, but an echo of one. Their name, spoken in a voice that is familiar. A voice that they have never heard.

Sirius is flung back abruptly, water bubbling and swirling as they upend and still. Their breath tries to catch in their lungs, the water flows in and out peacefully.

The night sky is laid out underneath them, vast and dazzling. The moon perches, heavy and watchful, in the corner. Their star reclines on the horizon, a blazing light that settles and burns in Sirius’ chest.

There is a part of Sirius that starts to dissolve with this light, which realizes that this water feels strange because it is not the place for a human. Their humanness does not belong here, does not fit.

Without that humanness...Sirius closes their eyes and slips into a dream. They have no thoughts, no feelings, no pain, not anymore. Just the stillness of the water, watched over by Mother Night. There is no dryness, no desert, no ebb and flow, no delta. There are no river rocks, no rich dark silt. They forget the way their rivulets lingered over the crops, the way the animals waded in their shallows, the slow pain of losing those things. They forget what hunger feels like, the taste of thirst, the feeling of sun on skin.

They open their eyes.

The other world hurts so much, even for a river. Sirius thinks of the blood they washed from Remus’ shoulder, the welts criss-crossing Regulus’ back, the way Lily flinches away from being looked at, the shaking of James’ hands when they left her camp behind with only enough water for a few days. They think of Andromeda, alone and aching, whispering ghost stories to herself to try and press meaning into the edges of inexorable death. They think of animal bones in the riverbed, of their stones scattered among so many people.

They think of how it would be to stay here, of letting the endless safety of primordial water, of World-Mother, fold over them. They think of how fragile life is, how easy it is to become lost in death. They think of all the names that have been unwritten, how even a star can die. They think of weightlessness, and weight.

Everything hangs in the balance of the scales, even that which is beyond life and death. Strangely, with the vastness of it all spread out below them, everything feels very small. Very human.

On one side of the scales is pain, blood, bone, dryness, a great and unnameable weight. On the other side of the scales-

There is a feather in their right hand. It has been there this whole time, perhaps, but Sirius has not been aware of it until this moment. It, like this body, does not fit here. Without thought, Sirius’ arm reaches out, placing the feather in the other pan of the scales.

It is fingernail thin lie the new moon, fragile and impossibly light, and it tips the scales to perfect evenness.

Sirius’ heart jolts sudden and hard in their chest.

_I’ll come back_ , they had said. They think of Remus, of Regulus, of James, of Lily. They think of the sun, which does not rise here. They think of the curious weight of feathers, of Remus’ wing bearing down over them in a crowded tent.

They think that perhaps, the sharpness and the briefness of that other life holds its balance against sun on skin, against the smell of rain, against the fierce swelling love that throbs through them as hard and fast as any river. It holds its balance, but it cannot overcome it.

The scales wait, patient, but Sirius does not hesitate. They snatch up the feather, clasping it over their heart. It burns into their skin, so hot and bright it is like the flash of a star on the horizon.

It burns, and Sirius laughs.

-

Remus desperately wants a different story. One where she is not left behind, again. One where she can mourn, can break apart, can dissolve into nothingness, can finally rest.

Being without Sirius feels sharp and unnatural. Thinking about Sirius never coming back is a burden she cannot sustain, cannot carry, must lay down.

She feels the awful weight of the temptation to run into the sea after them bearing down on her. What is the purpose of waiting, of continuing on, when she’s seen the ending already? Remus feels drier inside than the desert, like no amount of water can slake the thirst of her. She barely notices the miles passing as she stumbles back south, _up_ , to the place that they had arranged.

The other three are doing their parts back at the source of the river, long dry but still reachable. This task is left to Remus: guarding the place where Sirius might (might not) come back.

The high stone walls of it gape hungrily over the dry riverbed, shadowing Remus and scraping her hands bloody as she climbs them. She perches at the top and waits, the breeze at this height ruffling her feathers and cooling the sweat on her brow. She’s careful not to smudge the crude tree Lily and Remus had sketched out on the stonework the day before. She’s careful not to think about the thinness of this patched-together ritual, about the strength of death.

She waits so long that the sun dips below the horizon, that night spreads over the desert, that her legs start to go numb from sitting.

She does not sleep, her heart is hammering too hard for that. The pulse of her blood, the fluttering of her feathers, the clench of her hands against the stone of the dam, the ache in her shoulder, all of these things keep vigil through the long night.

At first, she thinks she’s just light-headed from lack of water, seeing things in the bare sliver of sunlight cresting the horizon. Perhaps she is.

Remus stumbles to her feet, walking carefully across the top of the dam toward the dark figure on the horizon. The person is backed by the rising sun, and a dawning fear stops Remus from calling out, from running. If this is not Sirius, she does not want to know.

Her feet do not stop; they are braver than her heart.

When she finally gets close enough to see, her heart drops. She had not thought herself foolish enough to hope, but the cruelty of having that hope snatched away slices through her like a knife. Whoever this is, it isn’t Sirius.

“Remus?” the person asks, uncertainly. “What’s wrong?”

Remus steps back on instinct, still too upset to properly feel surprise or fear. Her foot misses the edge of the stone, and she starts to tilt backward and to the side. Her hands jerk for something to grab, reflexively, but there’s nothing. Nothing, until the person reaches out, both hands around her wrists, and tugs her back to safety.

“Thank you,” she mutters, pulling her hands away. She looks down at the ground far below. The distance, the prospect of falling, hurts less than seeing the wreck of her hope again.

This person seems determined to get her attention, though, gently touching her chin and turning her face over and up.

“The stars have returned to their places in the heavens,” the person says. “Not to brag or anything.”

Remus frowns.

“Sirius?” she says uncertainly, not daring to hope. This person looks entirely different than Sirius. Taller, for one, with entirely different features. Even their eyes are unfamiliar.

They smile, though, and pull her into a hug, and something slots into place between Remus’ ribs. The body may be different, old shape lost to the sea, but the power and force of them is all Sirius.

She doesn’t even realize she’s crying again until Sirius pulls away, frowning and brushing the tears from her cheeks.

“What’s wrong? Aren’t you happy to see me?” The question sounds silly, almost boastful, but there is uncharacteristic shyness in the way Sirius asks. Remus bites her lip, squeezes Sirius’ hand hard.

“I didn’t think you’d come back,” she confesses. This lapse of faith feels more forgivable now, with Sirius real and solid in front of her.

Sirius opens their mouth, to protest or perhaps to tease, but then jerks their head up in surprise as thunder cracks and booms across the sky. The heavens open, and water pours down in drenching torrents. Sirius laughs, flinging the hand Remus isn’t holding out and tilting their head back to let the water run into their mouth and down their throat.

“Had to come back for this, didn’t I?” Sirius yells over the noise of the storm. They grin down at Remus, and she smiles back helplessly.

For the first time in five years, it rains.

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to ask questions! I have....like 8 apps worth of notes on this. Finishing this piece was and is really really important to me. It's the closest thing to my heart that I've ever written, and I'm glad to have it done and out there even though it feels very weak and imperfect. I guess that's just how it goes, rip. Thanks for reading!


End file.
